May
23
2025

Habeas Corpus This, Harvard!

Kristi may be weak on Constitutional rights, but she can compose a mean (literally mean) letter to the Harvard International Office:

Also on Harvards' case is Johanna Berkman at the Free Press: Attacking Jews at Harvard Doesn’t Just Go Unpunished. It Gets Rewarded..

In the year and a half since the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023, there have been so many alarming incidents on college campuses aimed at Jews. Many stick out for their grotesque imagery, for their outrageous slanders, and for their Soviet-style tactics. But the incident that I remember most vividly is the one that took place at Harvard University less than two weeks after Hamas invaded Israel, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping 250 more.

No one was physically injured that day. But the fact remained that the incident was wildly beyond the pale: a group of Harvard students surrounding another student, an Israeli named Yoav Segev, repeatedly screaming “Shame!” in his face, blocking his path, and forcing him to leave a part of campus that he was entitled to be in just as much as they were.

Video of the confrontation quickly went viral. You can watch it here.

The incident might have just disappeared from the news, like so many other videos of post-October 7 antisemitism on campus, if not for another shocking fact. The two aggressors who were the easiest to identify, because they were not wearing masks or hoodies and did not have keffiyehs around their faces, were not just Harvard students. They were also Harvard employees.

Well, that's disgusting.

But let me be clear: I was just kidding the other day about wanting to see Steven Pinker perp-walked into a Federal courthouse. I like him! And he takes to the NYT to ask for relief for his employer: Harvard Derangement Syndrome (gifted link).

In my 22 years as a Harvard professor, I have not been afraid to bite the hand that feeds me. My 2014 essay “The Trouble With Harvard” called for a transparent, meritocratic admissions policy to replace the current “eye-of-newt-wing-of-bat mysticism” which “conceals unknown mischief.” My 2023 “five-point plan to save Harvard from itself” urged the university to commit itself to free speech, institutional neutrality, nonviolence, viewpoint diversity and disempowering D.E.I. Last fall, on the anniversary of Oct. 7, 2023, I explained “how I wish Harvard taught students to talk about Israel,” calling on the university to teach our students to grapple with moral and historical complexity. Two years ago I co-founded the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, which has since regularly challenged university policies and pressed for changes.

So I’m hardly an apologist for my employer when I say that the invective now being aimed at Harvard has become unhinged. According to its critics, Harvard is a “national disgrace,” a “woke madrasa,” a “Maoist indoctrination camp,” a “ship of fools,” a “bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment,” a “cesspool of extremist riots” and an “Islamist outpost” in which the “dominant view on campus” is “destroy the Jews, and you’ve destroyed the root of Western civilization.”

Steven is a voice of sanity, of course. So is Yascha Mounk, who's also saying the Administration has gone too far: Trump’s Assault on Harvard Is an Astonishing Act of National Self-Sabotage.

Trump’s action would deeply disrupt the lives and the careers of thousands of talented young people, the vast majority of whom have done absolutely nothing to provoke the administration’s ire against their institution. It would have a highly negative impact on important research happening across the university, with some leading labs in fields from medical research to quantum physics effectively ceasing to function. It would lastingly damage America’s hard-earned reputation as the world’s most coveted destination for ambitious researchers. In short, it would lead to the most remarkable—and the most distinguished—exodus of talented students in the history of American higher education.

Well, that's a lot of information on both sides. I'm admittedly torn.

Also of note:

  • It was only yesterday Senator Maggie was lionized for quoting our state's motto! And in fact my Google LFOD news alert still has items about her berating Kristi Noem for not knowing her habeas from her corpus.

    But that LFOD thing only goes so far for Maggie, and for our state's other Senator as well. NHJournal reports: Shaheen, Hassan Vote to Uphold CA's Ban on Gas-Powered Cars.

    Both New Hampshire senators voted against a resolution ending California’s ban on the sale of gas-powered cars, giving the Granite State delegation an 0-4 record on the issue.

    The GOP-controlled Senate passed the resolution Thursday over nearly unanimous Democratic opposition, including Sens. Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen. (Michigan’s Sen. Elissa Slotkin was the sole Democrat to support the resolution.)

    The same resolution passed the House earlier this month with the support of 35 House Democrats, but Reps. Maggie Goodlander and Chris Pappas were both “no” votes.

    And, yes:

    Critics say banning consumers from buying gas-powered cars violates the Live Free or Die ethos of New Hampshire.

  • Dominic Pino is someone to watch. He has an LTE in the WSJ today: New York, SALT and the ‘Donor State’ Myth (gifted link). It is a masterpiece of concise argumentation. And I'm going to copy-n-paste the whole dang thing for your reading pleasure:

    In his May 17 letter “Why I Won’t Give In on the SALT Deduction,” Rep. Mike Lawler (R., N.Y.) writes that “New York is a donor state, receiving less money back than it sends to the federal government in tax revenue.” That hasn’t been true for the four most recent years for which data are available. Thanks to Covid spending, New York’s comptroller has reported receiving more money from Washington than the state’s taxpayers have given in fiscal years 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. As Matthew Schoenfeld wrote in these pages in 2020, the claim that New York is a donor state is based on including such sums as military pay and Social Security retiree benefits while excluding things like the tax exemption for municipal bonds—all of which make blue states look more like “donors” than they really are.

    New York’s state government spends twice as much as Florida’s does, despite the latter having more residents. No state has abused ObamaCare Medicaid expansion to the extent New York has. The healthcare program that is supposed to be for poor children and the disabled covers 44% of New York residents, about half of whom are able-bodied, working-age adults, and about a third of whom are likely ineligible for the program. If anything, New York should be more of a “donor” because the federal government should stop giving it billions of dollars in matching funds for enrolling able-bodied, working-age adults in Medicaid.

    If that’s how New Yorkers want to govern themselves, so be it, but they aren’t entitled to ask taxpayers in the rest of the country to pay for it. Nor are they entitled to an unlimited tax deduction for their state’s profligacy.

    The "big beautiful bill" the House passed yesterday, upped the "SALT cap" from $20K to $40K.

  • Speaking of the BBB… Charles C.W. Cooke looks at it and concludes: Trump Is Not Different.

    The House of Representatives has passed the “big beautiful bill” (BBB). It will now travel down the assembly line to the Senate, where, in all likelihood, it will remain mostly intact.

    This is disappointing news, for the BBB — could we perhaps stop calling omnibus legislation “BBB”? — is not a good law. It undoes much of what was good about the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. It includes a bailout for blue states such as California, New York, and New Jersey. It declines to effect a full repeal of the disastrous and dishonest “Inflation Reduction Act” of 2022. And, above all else, it fails to cut spending. As a result of its changes, the nation’s tax code will become more dysfunctional, our federal deficits will grow yet bigger, and our already-spiraling national debt will continue to mount indefinitely.

    Charles points out that the Trump-led GOP is acting pretty much the same as the "old guard" they contemptuously dismissed as RINOs.

  • A whole lotta "buts". Noah Rothman: A Man of the Left.

    Somewhere between the time when Luigi Mangione’s psychopathy led him to shoot United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the back and the point at which artists and musicians lionized him, his visage etched onto prayer candles and his ravings canonized on popular merchandise, too many Democratic politicians admitted that he had a point.

    “But” became the watchword. Yes, “violence is never the answer,” Democrats like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Chris Murphy, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others perfunctorily intoned. “But people can only be pushed so far,” Warren said. “But,” AOC added, people “interpret and feel” the banal machinations of the insurance industry “as an act of violence against them.” “But,” Sanders observed, “people are furious” at the health-care system. And the American system is “broken” anyway.

    You know who else had a point, according to the Democratic Party’s luminaries: the vandals, brutes, and criminals who made up the most menacing vanguard of the pro-Palestinian protest movement that erupted, grotesquely enough, within hours of the worst single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. That movement and the expressions of violence that so regularly accompanied it were subject to a similarly contrived beatification.

    Noah writes this "in the wake of the slaughter of two Israeli Embassy staffers, Sarah Lynn Milgrim, an American, and Yaron Lischinsky, because the time for pleasantries is over."

    Keep your eye out for the "But"ters.

Recently on the movie blog:

Lilo & Stitch

[5 stars] [IMDB Link] [Lilo & Stitch]

Okay, I realize this (like so many commercial offerings these days) is one more effort to squeeze some more cash out of people who recall enjoying an original creative product. And it may work for Disney. There was an article in the WSJ yesterday about it: Why Disney’s ‘Lilo & Stitch’ Is Set to Beat ‘Mission: Impossible’ at the Box Office (gifted link).

And, hey, it worked for me. In fact, I splurged for the 3-D glasses. (Consumer note: if you've been unimpressed by 3-D movies in the past, I doubt you'll be impressed here.)

I usually do a plot summary, so here you go: Stitch is a creation of an alien mad scientist, a weapon of war. So dangerous, he's marked for destruction by the alien government. But he's also resourceful and smart, escaping his keepers' clutches, hijacking a small spaceship, crash-landing on Earth. Specifically, Hawaii, where he decides to hide out by getting adopted by cute-as-a-button six-year-old Lilo, an orphan living with her equally orphaned sister, in an unstable living situation. The aliens send an inept undercover team to recover Stitch. Merry mayhem ensues.

There are numerous differences between the old animation and this new movie, including one biggie: Stitch really should be more afraid of water than he is.