Commentary on Immigration Legal and Illegal. Nikki Haley Continues To Prove Her Worthiness. Star Parker Speaks Out! Thoughts Regarding Comey's Appearance.

I favor legal immigration and believe illegal immigration and an unwillingness to enforce laws is the beginning of the end of any society and particularly one based on the rule of law such as ours.  It creates a dry rot that will destroy us from within. I further believe it best when  a nation has a single language.

I have nothing against those from Spanish speaking countries,  In fact, I find most to be hard workers, have conservative values and believe in a higher being.  Having said that, the message of tolerating illegality is something repugnant to me.

And then there is the Muslim community and immigration as seen through the eyes of Ben Carson. Anyone reading this will, or should, have doubts about its harsh conclusions but facts tend to consistently  support Carson so it is very disconcerting. (See 1 below.)

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I find this op ed by The Wall Street Journal of interest and, surprisingly, it conforms with my own thoughts and I also believe Henninger's op ed both compelling and chilling.  (See 2 and 2a below.)

From my perspective,  I believe:

a) Democrats have a vested interest in hanging Trump and thus are more likely to accept Comey's version of the truth. They are playing with fire because everything they do to make Trump's ability to function/govern is not only dangerous bu unpatriotic.

Comey's testimony was professional, to his credit and showed no evidence of his wanting to get back at the president who fired him.(See 2b below.)

b)  Trump will probably offer his own views and will probably dispute some of  Comey's claims and the mass media will probably then side with Comey.

Comey will have testified and Trump will not so Comey's testimony can be seen as more persuasive regardless of content.

c) I would like to see memorandums by Comey after other such type meetings because he claims he frequently memorializes previous conversations of meetings.

d) Trump will not be seen as having obstructed justice but probably engaged in conversations that were questionable. Since Trump has a quirky personality and is not politically presidential  he is probably less believable. Obviously Trump became annoyed with the drip, drip methods and tactics employed by political leakers and witch hunters in D.C.

 D.C. and politics brings out the worst in human behaviour.

e) Finally, there is now public evidence Atty General Lynch asked Comey, at the behest of Obama, to cool it with respect to any investigation of Clinton.
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Once again when something is repeated and then tolerated it becomes absorbed and eventually tolerated. (See 3 below.)
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Nikki Haley proves her value. (See 4 below.)
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My friend and fellow memo reader, Star Parker, has written something of interest regarding Sen. Sasse's book.

Our values and value system has been changing for a variety of reasons, some because of technological advances etc. but I do believe the change has accelerated since the '60's and is reaching dangerous proportions.(Our grandson works for Bill Maher.)  (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1)
DR BEN CARSON on MUSLIMS This  has been the underlying premise that has kept Christianity and  Islam  at war for almost 2000 years. They cannot and will not assimilate  into any  society that  does not embrace their theocratic views. Europe has already suffered a  recent  invasion of Muslims under the guise of  refugees that  will destroy Europe as we and they knew it. To ignore the same  here  will be at our peril.

This  denial has been the downfall of every non-Muslim nation which has refused to  or has been afraid to believe it - do not fall into the trap of thinking  anyone who is aware is racist or paranoid - the informed always have the  advantage. 
I  want adults and children to understand this regarding MUSLIMS. CAN  MUSLIMS BE GOOD AMERICANS?

Can good Muslims be a good American? 
Theologically  - no.  Because their allegiance is to Allah, The moon god of Arabia  .

Religiously - no.  Because no other religion is accepted by their  Allah except Islam.  (Quran,2:256)(Kora Scripturally - no.   Because their allegiance is to the five Pillars of Islam and the  Quran.

Geographically - no.  Because their allegiance is to Mecca,  to which they turn in prayer five times a day.

Socially - no.   Because their allegiance to Islam forbids them to make friends with  Christians or Jews. 

Politically - no.  Because they must submit to  the mullahs, who teach annihilation of Israel and destruction of America ,  the great Satan.
Domestically - no.  Because they are instructed to  marry four women and beat and scourge them when they disobey.  (Quran 4:34

Intellectually - no.  Because they cannot accept the  American Constitution since it is based on Biblical principles and they  believe the Bible to be corrupt.

Philosophically - no.  Because  Islam, Muhammad, and the Quran do not allow freedom of religion and  expression. Democracy and Islam cannot co-exist. Every Muslim government  is either dictatorial or autocratic.

Spiritually - no. Because when we  declare 'one nation under God,' The Christian's God is loving and kind,  while Allah is NEVER referred to as Heavenly father, nor is he ever called  love in the Quran's 99 excellent names.   Therefore,  after much study and deliberation...Perhaps we should be very suspicious  of ALL MUSLIMS in this country. They obviously cannot be both 'good'  Muslims and 'good' Americans. Call it what you wish, it's still the truth.  You had better believe it. The more who understand this, the better it  will be for our country and our future. The  religious war is bigger than we know or  understand!      Footnote:The  Muslims have said they will destroy us from within.  SO FREEDOM IS  NOT FREE.

+++++++++++++++++++2) The ‘Independent’ Mr. Comey

His prepared testimony shows why he deserved to be fired.

The Senate Intelligence Committee released James Comey’s prepared testimony a day early on Wednesday, and it looks like a test of whether Washington can apprehend reality except as another Watergate. Perhaps the defrocked FBI director has a bombshell still to drop. But far from documenting an abuse of power by President Trump, his prepared statement reveals Mr. Comey’s misunderstanding of law enforcement in a democracy.

Mr. Comey’s seven-page narrative recounts his nine encounters with the President-elect and then President, including an appearance at Trump Tower, a one-on-one White House dinner and phone calls. He describes how he briefed Mr. Trump on the Russia counterintelligence investigation and what he calls multiple attempts to “create some sort of patronage relationship.”

But at worst Mr. Comey’s account of Mr. Trump reveals a willful and naive narcissist who believes he can charm or subtly intimidate the FBI director but has no idea how Washington works. This is not new information.

When you’re dining alone in the Green Room with an operator like Mr. Comey—calculating, self-protective, one of the more skilled political knife-fighters of modern times—there are better approaches than asserting “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.” Of course the righteous director was going to “memorialize” (his word) these conversations as political insurance.

Mr. Trump’s ham-handed demand for loyalty doesn’t seem to extend beyond the events of 2016, however. In Mr. Comey’s telling, the President is preoccupied with getting credit for the election results and resentful that the political class is delegitimizing his victory with “the cloud” of Russian interference when he believes he did nothing wrong.

Mr. Comey also confirms that on at least three occasions he told Mr. Trump that he was not a personal target of the Russia probe. But Mr. Comey wouldn’t make a public statement to the same effect, “most importantly because it would create a duty to correct” if Mr. Trump were implicated. This is odd because the real obligation is to keep quiet until an investigation is complete.

More interesting is that Mr. Trump’s frustration at Mr. Comey’s refusal raises the possibility that the source of Mr. Trump’s self-destructive behavior isn’t a coverup or a bid to obstruct the investigation. The source could simply be Mr. Trump’s wounded pride.

The most troubling part of Mr. Comey’s statement is his belief in what he calls “the FBI’s traditionally independent status in the executive branch,” which he invokes more than once. Independent? This is a false and dangerous view of law enforcement in the American system.

Mr. Comey is describing an FBI director who essentially answers to no one. But the police powers of the government are awesome and often abused, and the only way to prevent or correct abuses is to report to elected officials who are accountable to voters. A director must resist intervention to obstruct an investigation, but he and the agency must be politically accountable or risk becoming the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover.

Mr. Comey says Mr. Trump strongly suggested in February that he close the Michael Flynn file, but after conferring with his “FBI senior leadership” he decided not to relay the conversation to Attorney General Jeff Sessions or any other Justice Department superior. If he thought he was being unduly pressured he had a legal obligation to report, and in our view to resign, but he says he didn’t because “we expected” that Mr. Sessions would recuse himself from Russia involvement.

Well, how did he know? Mr. Sessions didn’t recuse himself until two weeks later. Mr. Comey also didn’t tell the acting Deputy AG, who at the time was a U.S. attorney whom Mr. Comey dismisses as someone “who would also not be long in the role.”

This remarkable presumptuousness is the Comey mindset that was on display last year. He broke Justice Department protocol to absolve Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified material, without the involvement of Justice prosecutors or even telling then Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Mr. Comey’s disregard for the chain of legal command is why Mr. Trump was right to fire him, whatever his reasons.

Also on Wednesday two leaders of the intelligence community told the Senate Wednesday that they had not been pressured to cover up anything. “I have never been pressured—I have never felt pressured—to intervene or interfere in any way with shaping intelligence in a political way or in relation to an ongoing investigation,” said Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats. National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers added that he never been asked “to do anything I believe to be illegal, immoral, unethical or inappropriate.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump announced that he is nominating respected Justice Department veteran Christopher Wray as the next FBI director. Let’s hope Mr. Wray has a better understanding of the FBI’s role under the Constitution than Mr. Comey does.

2a) Can Trump Govern?

The White House has arrived at a binary choice: Choose chaos or choose success.

By Daniel Henninger

The answer to the question—can President Trump govern?—is yes, but the window is closing.

In recent days, events outside and inside the White House have combined to produce an environment toxic to governing. The Comey circus, the internal tensions created by Mr. Trump’s tweets on the travel ban and Qatar, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s reported offer to resign: All this turbulence is pounding a ship of state that needs calmer waters if it’s going to get home in one piece.

This column raised the question in February of whether the Russia story was becoming Mr. Trump’s Watergate. Forever Trumpers objected to the analogy, arguing correctly that the legal particulars of the two events were not the same. The point, however, was not about the law or facts but about politics, which respects neither. A president’s blood is in the water, and a feeding frenzy is on.

The idea that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton by now looks like a ghost story. On Sunday, Sen. Mark Warner, Democratic vice chairman of the intelligence committee, said, “There is a lot of smoke,” but there is “no smoking gun at this point.”

None of that diminishes the political threat evident in the appearance of former FBI Director James Comey before the Senate Intelligence Committee.

"It is a familiar spectacle, in which a president is subjected to Washington’s version of the ancient trials by ordeal. It did it to Richard Nixon —and Lyndon Johnson, who descended into political madness from watching the evening news report his troubles on three televisions in the Oval Office.

In the Trump trial, James Comey is playing the role of John Dean, the earnest lawyer who presented himself to the Watergate Committee as the last honest man in the Nixon White House. The media’s dramaturges love to fashion political saints, thus the elevation of Jim Comey.

The dangers to the viability of the Trump presidency’s agenda at this pivotal moment should not be underestimated. Successful governing means putting multiple players in motion toward a common goal—White House staff, Congress and its staffs, and the administration’s political appointees, whose job is to push presidential policy through the bureaucratic swamps. That effort goes forward on the shoulders of a skeleton crew.

We are into the sixth month of the Trump presidency, and of 558 key positions requiring Senate confirmation, 427 have no nominee, according to the tabulation by the Partnership for Public Service. The permanent bureaucracy is running much of State, Defense, Justice and Education.

At the State Department, virtually every position below Secretary Rex Tillerson and his deputy John Sullivan has no nominee, including assistant secretaries for every region of the world.

For why this matters, look to Asia, where North Korea’s nuclear threat occupies everyone’s waking hours. Mr. Trump has met with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and Mr. Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis all have visited the region to address North Korea.

But if you ask Asian governments about the status of the follow-up, they will tell you they don’t know what’s next because the U.S. has no assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs and therefore no daily liaison executing Mr. Trump’s policy goals. Much of the Trump government is close to becalmed.

The appointee holdup at State is due, in part, to the Trump White House’s virtual ban on anyone in the foreign-policy community who publicly opposed Mr. Trump’s candidacy. Presumably this is about loyalty. After this week, though, the White House’s fastidiousness may be irrelevant.

Three things happened that bear on the administration’s ability to recruit or retain good people: Attorney General Sessions’s reported offer to resign over the president’s unhappiness with his recusal from the Russia investigation; Mr. Trump’s tweet repudiating his Justice Department lawyers’ handling of the travel-ban case; and his tweet taking personal credit for Saudi Arabia breaking relations with Qatar. That required a stabilizing intervention from Secretary Tillerson because the U.S. has 11,000 troops based in Qatar. Welcome to team Trump.

One relevant footnote is George Conway’s unexpected decision to withdraw last week as Mr. Trump’s nominee to lead the Justice Department’s civil division, followed by hisTwitter statement supporting the department’s handling of the travel-ban litigation. Who needs “House of Cards”?

One simply cannot duck the corollary question to these events: What top lawyer or professional at this juncture will join an administration whose ability to calm the political storms, execute policy or support its own people is in doubt?

On Fox News Tuesday evening Sen. Lindsey Graham offered the president some wise counsel: “Mr. President: Your words matter now, you’re no longer a candidate for office. You’re the president of the United States and a lot of us want to help you. Help us help you.”

Normalcy is the oxygen of good governance. The Trump White House has arrived at a binary choice: Choose chaos or choose success.

2b)NEW YORK POST

 In quest for a Trump crime, Dems refuse to take ‘no’ for an answer

By Jonathan S. Tobin

Is President Trump guilty of obstruction of justice? Not if you take the nation’s three top security officials and former FBI Director James Comey at their word — something Senate Democrats refuse to do.

The headlines about Comey’s opening statement, which he’ll give in person Thursday but which was released Wednesday afternoon, focus on his claim that Trump asked him to “let it go” with respect to a criminal probe of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s lies about his conversations with the Russians.

But the very same opening statement indicates that even now, after he has been fired by Trump, Comey is still unwilling to assert that he took anything Trump said as an effort to hinder “the broader investigation into Russia or possible links to his campaign.”

Much the same was heard from National Intelligence Director Dan Coats, National Security Agency Director Admiral Michael Rogers and Acting FBI director Andrew McCabe when they testified Wednesday. Though all rightly refused to discuss confidential conversations about classified subjects and ongoing investigations with the president in a public forum, all three are on record as saying Trump hasn’t tried to undermine their work.

“I have never been pressured, I’ve never felt pressure to intervene or interfere in any way with shaping intelligence in a political way or in relationship to an ongoing investigation,” Coats said.

It’s true that President Trump is guilty of terrible judgment. He shouldn’t have made the request about Flynn, or asked for Comey’s loyalty.

But if even a veteran grandstander like Comey — as Democrats should remember from his various statements about Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal during the 2016 campaign — isn’t willing to say Trump obstructed justice here, it’s obvious these hearings are about politics, not criminality.

You don’t have to think Trump acted wisely to know Democrats view the Intelligence Committee hearings as an attempt to set the stage for impeachment should the GOP lose control of Congress in 2018. The same is true of the attempt to twist Trump’s sympathy for Flynn as “a good guy [who] has been through a lot” — a sentiment Comey said he shared — into an impeachable offense. In the absence of evidence beyond Comey’s equivocal and self-serving memo, the obstruction charge against Trump is almost certainly a legal dead end.

As it happens, the nation does have other business to consider. The purpose of Wednesday’s Senate hearing was to discuss the National Security Agency’s warrantless-surveillance program used to fight Islamist terrorists.

The law that enables this effort — the FISA Amendments Act — will expire at the end of the year. Prompt congressional action is required to ensure that a measure that enabled the United States to take out a major ISIS leader isn’t stopped by Capitol Hill gridlock as Democrats continue to slow-walk the legislative process.

But the fight against the Islamic State didn’t interest committee Democrats any more than it did the mainstream media’s coverage of the event. If your sole interest is in finding a pretext to impeach the man who won last November’s election, even discussing the fight against terrorism is a wasted moment for those “resisting” Trump.

That’s a partisan view fair-minded Americans shouldn’t share.

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3)

Alan Dershowitz: A New Tolerance for Antisemitism

by Alan Dershowitz

All over the world antisemites are becoming mainstreamed. It is no longer disqualifying to be outed as a Jew-hater. This is especially so if the antisemite uses the cover of rabid hatred for the nation-state of the Jewish people. These bigots succeed in becoming accepted — even praised — not because of their antisemitism, but despite it. Increasingly, they are given a pass on their Jew-hatred because those who support them admire or share other aspects of what they represent. This implicit tolerance of antisemitism — as long as it comes from someone whose other views are acceptable — represents a dangerous new trend from both the Right and Left.

In the United States, the Trump election has brought hard-right antisemitism into public view, but the bigotry of the hard-left is far more prevalent and influential on many university campuses. Those on the Left who support left-wing antisemites try to downplay, ignore or deny that those they support are really antisemites. “They are anti-Zionist” is the excuse de jure. Those on the Right do essentially the same, saying, “They are nationalists.” Neither side would accept such transparent and hollow justifications if the shoe were on the other foot. I believe that when analyzing and exposing these dangerous trends, a single standard of criticism must be directed at each.

Generally speaking, extreme right-wing antisemitism continues to be a problem in many parts of Europe and among a relatively small group of “alt-right” Americans. But it also exists among those who self-identify as run-of-the-mill conservatives.

Consider, for example, former presidential candidate and Reagan staffer, Pat Buchanan. The list of Buchanan’s anti-Jewish bigotry is exhaustive. Over the years, he has consistently blamed Jews for wide-ranging societal and political problems. In his criticism of the Iraq War, for example, Buchanan infamously quipped: “There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East: the Israeli Defense Ministry and its ‘Amen’ corner in the United States.” He then singled out for rebuke only Jewish political figures and commentators, such as Henry Kissinger, Charles Krauthammer and A.M. Rosenthal. He did not mention any of the vocal non-Jewish supporters of the war.

Furthermore, Buchanan also said that “the Israeli lobby” would be responsible if President Obama decided to strike Iran, threatening that if it were to happen, “Netanyahu and his ‘Amen’ corner in Congress” would face “backlash worldwide.”

Buchanan’s sordid flirtation with Nazi revisionism is also well documented.

Meanwhile, on university campuses the absurd concept of “intersectionality” — which has become a code word for antisemitism — is dominating discussions and actions by the hard-left. The warm embrace of Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour — who recently delivered the commencement address at a City University of New York graduation — is a case in point. Since co-organizing the Women’s March on Washington in January, Sarsour has become a feminist icon for so called “progressives.”

This is the same Linda Sarsour who has said that feminism and Zionism are incompatible, stating: “You either stand up for the rights of all women, including Palestinians, or none. There’s just no way around it.”

And when speaking about two leading female anti-Islamists, Brigitte Gabriel and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (who is a victim of female genital mutilation), the feminist de jure, Linda Sarsour, said: “I wish I could take away their vaginas.”

The irony is palpable. Under her own all-or-nothing criteria, Sarsour — who is also a staunch BDS supporter — cannot be pro-Palestinian and a feminist because the Palestinian Authority and Hamas subjugate women and treat gays far worse than Israel does.

Indeed, Sarsour has emerged as a champion of the hard-left. Both New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio and Bernie Sanders have sought her endorsement. Moreover, Deputy DNC Chair, Keith Ellison — who himself has a sordid history with antisemitism stemming from his association with Louis Farrakhan, a man who has publicly boasted about his own Jew-hatred — has come out in support of the bigoted Sarsour. When it comes to Ellison, an old idiom comes to mind: a man is known by the company he keeps.

The same trend is detectable among the hard-left in Europe, particularly in Britain, which is days away from an election. The British Labour Party has now been hijacked by radical extremists on the Left, and is known for being soft on antisemitism.

In a recent interview with a BBC reporter, Emma Barnett — who happens to be Jewish — Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn fumbled when answering a question about how much his proposed childcare policy would cost. Rather than critique Corbyn, Labour supporters viciously trolled the Jewish BBC reporter. Tweets such as these abounded: “Allegations have surfaced that @Emmabarnett is a Zionist” and “Zionist Emma Barnett (family lived off brothels) attacks Jeremy Corbyn.”

Corbyn has also been accused of anti-Jewish bigotry himself. He has said in the past that the genocidal Hamas terrorist group should be removed from the UK’s designated terror list and has called Hezbollah and Hamas (which are both vowed to the destruction of the nation-state of the Jewish people) “my friends.” (I recently wrote extensively on Corbyn’s association with some of Britain’s most notorious Holocaust deniers and antisemites.)

Increasingly, antisemitic discourse is also seeping into the arts and academia.

Consider the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bigotry of former Pink Floyd bassist, Roger Waters. A staunch supporter of the so-called BDS movement, Waters has said about the Palestinians that “parallels with what went on in the ’30s in Germany are so crushingly obvious.” He also had a pig shape balloon with a Star of David on it at one of his concerts. And when asked about his aggressive effort to recruit people to join the BDS movement, Waters blamed “the Jewish lobby,” which he explained is “extraordinarily powerful here and particularly in the industry that I work in, the music industry.” In 2013, the ADL declared that “anti-Semitic conspiracy theories” had “seeped into the totality” of Waters’ views.

Likewise, the marketplace of ideas on college campuses and within academic institutions has seen an embrace of antisemitism often disguised as anti-Zionism. Several years ago, I identified the dangerous trend of academics crossing a red line between acceptable criticism of Israel and legitimizing Jew-hatred. This was in light of the disgraceful endorsement by a number of prominent academics, of an antisemitic book written by Gilad Arzmon — a notorious Jew-hater who denies the Holocaust and attributed widespread economic troubles to a “Zio-punch.”

When asked recently about the hullabaloo surrounding her CUNY address, Linda Sarsour disingenuously played the victim card, saying, “Since the Women’s March on Washington, once the right-wing saw a very prominent Muslim-American woman in a hijab who was a Palestinian who was resonating with a community in a very large way, they made it their mission to do everything they can to take my platform away.”

No, Ms. Sarsour. You are wrong. This is not a smear campaign by the “right-wing,” but rather, a show that people of goodwill reject your manifestations of bigotry.

Those who tolerate antisemitism from those they otherwise admire would never accept other forms of bigotry, such as racism, sexism or homophobia. It’s difficult to imagine Bernie Sanders campaigning for a socialist who didn’t like black people or who was against gay marriage. But he is comfortable campaigning for Jeremy Corbyn, who has made a career out of condemning Zionists — by which he means Jews.

The growing tolerance for antisemitism by both the extreme Left and Right is quickly becoming mainstream. That is why it is so dangerous and must be exposed for what it is: complicity in and encouragement of the oldest form of bigotry.

Shame on those who tolerate antisemitism when it comes from their side of the political spectrum.

People on both sides of the aisle must have the same zero tolerance for antisemitism as they do for sexism, racism and homophobia. Decent people everywhere — Jews and non-Jews — must condemn with equal vigor all manifestations of bigotry whether they emanate from the hard alt-right or hard alt-left.

I will continue to judge individuals on the basis of their own statements and actions, regardless of which side of the aisle they come from.

Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Emeritus, at Harvard Law School and author of Taking the Stand: My Life in the Law and Electile Dysfunction: A Guide for the Unaroused Voter. Follow him on Twitter @AlanDersh and Facebook. This article was originally published by the Gatestone Institute.

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4)Haley to Netanyahu: "I Have No Patience" for UN Attacks on Israel

United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that she defends Israel at the UN because "if there's anything I have no patience for, [it's] bullies."

Netanyahu greeted Haley on the first day of her trip to Israel, thanking her "for all your help and standing up for Israel, standing up for the truth, which is standing up for America."

Her visit follows a speech delivered Tuesday before the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), which Haley threatened to leave if it does not cease disproportionately targeting Israel. “It is essential the council address its chronic anti-Israel bias if it’s to have any credibility," Haley said, noting that the UNHRC passed five anti-Israel resolutions in March but failed to address "the rapidly deteriorating human rights situation in Venezuela," where at least 69 people have been killed during protests against the government.

In a speech at the Graduate Institute of Geneva later on Tuesday, Haley mapped out the necessary reforms the UNHRC would have to make to correct its "credibility deficit.” That term was previously used by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to describe the UN Human Rights Commission, the predecessor of the UNHRC, which was disbanded under his watch as it "had lost the world’s trust."

But the credibility problems have persisted with the UNHRC, where "the victims of the world’s most egregious human rights violations are too often ignored by the very organization that is supposed to protect them," Haley said. She highlighted the council's inaction on---and, in some cases, praise of--Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, and Zimbabwe before calling it "a forum for politics, hypocrisy, and evasion – not the forum for conscience that its founders envisioned."

She called for the UNHRC to stop electing some of the world's worst human rights abusers to leadership positions, proposing that it open up the voting process to public scrutiny and force prospective members to defend their records.

Haley also encouraged the removal of Agenda Item Seven, a standing item that forces the council to review Israel's human rights record at every session. No other country is subject to a similar agenda item. "There is no legitimate human rights reason for this agenda item to exist," she observed. "It is the central flaw that turns the Human Rights Council from an organization that can be a force for universal good, into an organization that is overwhelmed by a political agenda."

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5) The Poster child for liberals’ Perpetual Adolescence
By Star Parker

Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse appeared on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher" show to promote his new book, "The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming of Age Crisis -- And How To Build a Culture of Self Reliance."

Surely Sasse didn't expect this routine publicity spot for his book to turn into a media storm. But thanks to Bill Maher's infamous and irreverent mouth, this is what happened.

Maher, of course, makes his living being irreverent.

But now he has discovered that even a rich left-wing provocateur has lines he can't cross. And using the classic word of black denigration -- the N-word -- is one of them.

Now he has apologized -- surely not out of any personal remorse but out of career damage control. Whether he will pay a price for his casual exploitation of the pain of others remains to be seen. Regardless, we should ask if there is something to learn here.

Maher did Senator Sasse a kind of favor. His behavior was advertisement for the relevance of Sasse's book.

Sasse discusses in this book what he sees as a trend in America toward "perpetual adolescence" -- a deferral of the transition from child to adult.

He is not talking about biological adulthood. He is talking about cultural adulthood.

It's about taking responsibility for one's life and, in an even broader sense, for the challenge of living.

We come into this world as egoists. Everything revolves around us. Growing up involves discovering that the world is about more than me, that there are others, and that we are all part of something greater than ourselves.

But this is really exactly the opposite frame of mind that our society today supports.

Instead, the values our culture tends to celebrate and encourage are those of the perpetual adolescence that Ben Sasse talks about.

Everything is about me -- my wants, my claims, my rights.

A Gallup poll from last month bears the headline "Americans Hold Record Liberal Views On Most Moral Issues."

Positive responses are at record highs for the moral acceptability of birth control (91 percent), divorce (73 percent), sex between an unmarried man and woman (69 percent), homosexual relations (63 percent), out-of-wedlock birth (62 percent), abortion (43 percent), pornography (36 percent).

Despite the overwhelming evidence correlating traditional family life with personal health and prosperity, Americans are increasingly casting aside this vital social institution. Why? Because along with it comes responsibility, caring about others as well as oneself, and caring about the future as well as the present. Taking on the responsibility of marriage and family means transitioning to becoming an adult.

This transition also means appreciating and recognizing that there is knowledge I do not have, and that it is important to learn. This builds humility rather than arrogance.

Which gets back to Bill Maher. It is no accident that in a 2016 Gallup poll only 32 percent of Americans said they have "a great deal" or "a fair amount" of trust in the media. In a society without an appreciation for lifelong learning, where young people arrive at universities feeling they already have enough wisdom, media is going to be about entertainment, not knowledge.

So our media stars are provocateurs such as Maher, whose objective is to violate sensibilities, because this builds audience. He doesn't care about knowledge. He also doesn't care about respect, and what was once taught as the Golden Rule -- to treat others as you wish to be treated. This is adult behavior.

So, Bill Maher helped Ben Sasse make his case about "The Vanishing American Adult" by showing how he makes a handsome living in a society that rewards perpetual adolescence.

Of course, Bill Maher is far from alone. Increasingly, all our media is about provocation rather than knowledge.

Meanwhile, Senator Ben Sasse has an important message for the nation. If we want a future, we need to grow up.

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