What If Fox News Were to Disappear?

During his explanation of what motivates the hatred towards Robert Murdoch's flagship TV show — Hating Fox News, there's a reason for it — Bill O'Reilly asks What would happen if Fox News were to disappear (08:05-08:30).

Check out especially Charles Krauthammer's comment at 05:25 to 06:15.

Moral Equivalence: Russia and Ukraine Compared to Israel and the West Bank

• Diplomacy ain't his forte

Last year, Serguei produced a hard-hitting cartoon on "Super-Tsar Putin" and his muscular saber-rattling in Ukraine, but in the very same issue of Le Monde, needless to say, Plantu had to, just had to, draw a moral equivalence with Israel and the Palestinians.

Note to those who think this is an immeasurably smart cartoon: unless I am mistaken, there is no party in Kiev which holds that Russia and its people ought to be pushed back into the sea (which sea would that be?!) or that the children of (or the adults who make up) the Ukrainian people ought to blow themselves up in Russian malls and schools.

• Another 400 hectares annexed!!!
• That Putin, what a dirty sonuvabitch!!
• Not at all! This is the West Bank!

Les Décodeurs : Le Monde Starts a Fact-Checking Department

Taking its cue from across the Atlantic, Le Monde had introduced a fact-checking department, Les Décodeurs, to get back to facts.

The team boasts a charter.

Just like in MSM America, as can be seen in its special 40 Urban Legends piece, the Décodeurs' rule seems to be much more to expose and fight against the ideas and policies of the right than their equivalents of the left (little if anything on, say, global warming)…
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Welcome to the United States! One night a year, all crimes are allowed

Welcome to the United States!
One night a year, all crimes are allowed.

In France, the Purge films are called American Nightmare — just so you know where the really inhumane and monstrous people live and in what country the real danger to humanity comes from…
 

When Government Scandals Explode, Barack Obama Always Seems to Have Been Unaware About Them Until the Media Broke the Story

For someone who is supposed to be the most intelligent man in the world and the best president in U.S. history as well as someone who understands just about all problems and, just as importantly, has the solution to just about every one of those problems, Barack Obama seems to have a strange dearth of information about the government he leads when scandals about his administration surface. Fox News:

FOR ALL THE VAST INTELLIGENCE RESOURCES at his fingertips, the most powerful man in the world claims he gets a lot of his first dose of inside info on scandals and controversy — like deaths at VA facilities, IRS targeting, Fast and Furious gun-running, the Air Force One NYC flyover, and now Clinton emails — from outside news sources.

We simply don’t decide contentious issues in Congress anymore; That’s what Obama and his proxies are for

Last month, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved a propagandistically named “net neutrality” plan by a party-line vote of three to two

writes Benny Huang.

 … surely a momentous decision like this one can’t be made within the executive branch, behind closed doors, by a group of unelected bureaucrats? And surely they can’t keep the plan secret until it passes?

Constitutionally speaking, they can’t. According to Article I of the Constitution, the power to create law is vested in the legislative branch. Legislators are not authorized to abdicate their responsibilities to a board, much less to the executive branch, which is where the FCC resides. A decision this important requires a full hearing in the halls of Congress with a vote by our elected representatives.

But that’s soooooo twentieth century. If the events of recent months are any indicator, the United States has officially transcended the messy process of legislating. We simply don’t decide contentious issues in Congress anymore. That’s what President Obama and his proxies are for.

The trend didn’t begin in recent months, or even with the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama, but it has nonetheless picked up speed like a runaway train since the Republican landslide of 2014. The president, if you can still call him that, is now facing some tepid opposition in Congress, which apparently entitles him to bypass that body entirely. It’s their fault for opposing his agenda. If they weren’t so “obstructionist” or “dysfunctional,” they’d give the president whatever he wants, no questions asked. The same principle does not apply to all presidents, of course, only this one.

 … there’s the issue of President Obama’s executive amnesty for illegal aliens, which is clearly illegal, and he knows it. He even said so on Univision, warning Hispanic voters that there’s a process to changing laws and the process matters. “With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case…. There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply through executive order ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as president.” That was before he decided that the power was in fact his to wield. Kind of makes you wonder what took him so long to use it?

The Obama Administration’s argument, as far as I can tell, is that it’s merely exercising a little prosecutorial “discretion.” Such a thing does exist but it must be exercised with extreme caution lest justice devolve into the arbitrary rule of men, which I’m beginning to suspect is this president’s goal. 

Actually changing the law would require congressional action but, the administration posits, since the administration is not changing the law, there’s no need. Unfortunately, President Obama said something quite different when a group of pro-illegal immigration hecklers interrupted him in Chicago. “You’re absolutely right that there have been significant numbers of deportations… But what you are not paying attention to is the fact that I just took an action to change the law,” Obama said.

Change the law? Can presidents just do that? Apparently no one ever taught this supposed constitutional scholar that the president doesn’t get to do whatever he wants just because he thinks he has right on his side. But alas, the lesson he’s learned in Washington is quite the opposite. He’s seen that he can change immigration laws and ban a popular type of ammunition with the snap of his fingers, so what’s to stop him from regulating the internet? No one has yet stopped him. I’ve resigned myself to believe that no one ever will.

The Arab League (Finally) Ready to Confront ISIS

By Plantu in Le Monde

Let's Parler Franglais!