The Conservative Cave

Steyer is promising to do things that a governor has no authority to do.

I'd call the Democratic candidates cartoon characters, but cartoon characters have personalities.

On April 14, the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, together with Hillel -- a Jewish students' association -- hosted an event featuring Omer Shem Tov, a 23-year-old who was abducted by terrorists from the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, 2023, and held captive by Hamas for 505 days.
One week later, the Undergraduate Students Association Council released a statement condemning the event on the grounds that it "advance[d] incomplete and harmful representations of ongoing violence."

The student council did not condemn a government action. Or a political rally. Or a military campaign. It condemned an event featuring a young person, just like them, who had survived 505 days in the clutches of internationally recognized terrorists, only because the event did not also focus on Palestinian suffering.

A failed Palestinian suicide bomber released as part of an October 7 massacre hostage ransom spoke remotely to University of California, Berkeley students on Monday at an event held in one of the university's classrooms, according to social media posts by the organizing student groups.

Israa Jaabis, who was convicted of an attempted car bombing in Jerusalem in 2015, spoke by video call to students in Berkeley Law School classroom 170 during a Palestinian Political Prisoners Day event organized by Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine and UC Berkeley Students for Justice in Palestine.

The video posted on Wednesday by UCB SJP, in which Jaabis addresses the students, shows a full classroom of students clapping for the failed terrorist.

In the early 1990s, I was the opinion pages editor of the Oceanside Blade-Citizen in San Diego County. We were a 30,000 circulation daily serving Oceanside, Carlsbad, Vista and Encinitas. At that time, California and a few other states were pioneering new laws that required financial institutions to share with customers the files they kept on us - and to provide a process for challenging inaccurate information.
The editorial board - publisher Tom Missett, managing editor Rusty Harris, and myself - were in favor of this development, and wrote a series of editorials in support of it. Then we went a step further, and in another editorial argued that political and activist organizations that keep files on American citizens should also have to disclose those files on request, and have a process whereby inaccurate information could be challenged.

We had in mind everyone from the National Rifle Association to the ACLU - the sorts of nonprofit advocacy groups that tend to monitor what their perceived opponents write and say in public.

But it was only the Southern Poverty Law Center we heard from.

I have no idea how they knew a mid-size daily in Southern California had written an editorial in favor of transparency and accountability, but they weren't happy. Maybe a reader who disagreed with our position forwarded it to SPLC headquarters halfway across the country, maybe a newspaper near them picked it up off the wire and ran it - it didn't matter.

What mattered was that someone from the SPLC called Rusty and warned that this was a dangerous idea. That this would make it more difficult and expensive for them to track white supremacists and racists.

Rusty, in his quiet Texas drawl, pointed out that being falsely accused of espousing such views could be devastating to the person so accused - and that surely no reasonable person could oppose allowing people to clear their name?

Well, that never happens, they told him.

Rusty then suggested they submit a commentary in response to our editorial, and said he's make sure it ran.

No, he was told. That isn't good enough. They wanted a retraction of our editorial!

Rusty patiently explained that we'd already given this quite a bit of thought, and we stood by our position.

Then things turned ugly. It would be unfortunate, the SPLC rep told Rusty, if the SPLC had to add a newspaper of all things to their hate watch list! That they would name our editorial board members as well, let the world know that we supported hate!

BARCELONA, April 24 (Reuters) – Leading medical journal The Lancet will decline a request to provide evidence for a U.S. Senate inquiry into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, its editor-in-chief Richard Horton told Reuters in an interview on Friday.

“We have received a request to go and give evidence at a Senate inquiry, which we’re not going to do,” Horton told Reuters at the Reuters Pharma event in Barcelona.

Horton said that the journal would not engage “with an administration that has attacked some of the foremost scientists of our age”, citing the treatment by President Donald Trump’s administration of a former top U.S. health official, Anthony Fauci, who led the country’s COVID-19 response.