powerline hinderaker

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islamophobe

denier co2 BS

see hinderaker 2x node

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forgotten till 2 26 somali fraud bs

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Media

2 26 GRAB NO LNX

Trump's proud address — Eds., NY Post

A colossus on the Court — Mark Pulliam, Law & Liberty

The anti-Zionism exception — Matthew Segal, Tablet

Spain's gov't out of control — Drieu Godefridi, Gatestone

Bari Weiss the latest target — Tim Graham, JWR

Pride and petulance — Andrew Stiles, Free Beacon

An offer they couldn't refuse… — Sasha Stone, Free Thinking

Unmasked — Joseph Bessette, CRB

February 25, 2026 — Bill Glahn

The habeas appeal

:{Featured imageIt appears that the U.S. Department of Justice will be appealing that baseless contempt of court citation imposed by Minnesota-based federal district Judge Laura Provinzino (Biden appointee) last week. I covered the incident here, which involves a habeas corpus case captioned Rigoberto Soto-Jiminez v. Bondi, et. al (File No. 26-cv-957). The facts are pretty straightforward: Mr. Soto is an illegal alien, picked up by ICE. His private lawyer filed a habeas petition for his release. Contrary »Read more...8 Responses}

February 25, 2026 — John Hinderaker

The Union Is Strong, and So Is Trump

Featured imageI want to add a few thoughts to Scott’s post on the State of the Union, with which I agree. I don’t know whether last night’s speech was the longest SOTU ever, but it had to be the most combative. The fact that President Trump can keep it up for nearly two hours is impressive, but I have to think most viewers had turned in by the time he finished. »

Three Cheers for CO2

I have been following debates over global warming since the 1990s. In the early days, the oil companies defended themselves both by challenging the bad science underlying the global warming theory and by pointing out the benefits of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. At one time I had a VHS documentary called “The Greening of Planet Earth” on that topic.

The benefits of CO2 are indisputable, as anyone who knows anything about photosynthesis–i.e. everyone who went to school before the collapse of recent years–will understand. The Sahara Desert is shrinking, while the rain forests are becoming more lush. That is the theme of this article by a NASA scientist: “Satellite record shows boreal forests expanded 12% and shifted north since 1985.” 12% is a lot!

To understand the changing dynamics of boreal forests, Min Feng and colleagues analyzed the biome from 1985 to 2020, leveraging the longest and highest-resolution satellite record of calibrated tree cover to date. The study, published in Biogeosciences with four co-authors from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, confirms a northward shift in boreal forest cover over the past four decades.

The analysis revealed that boreal forests both grew in size and moved northward. The forests expanded by 0.844 million km² (a 12% increase) and shifted northward by 0.29° mean latitude, with gains concentrated between 64°N and 68°N. Their work also showcased the capacity of new growth to act as a carbon sink. Young boreal forests (up to 36 years) hold an estimated 1.1–5.9 petagrams of carbon (Pg C) with the potential to sequester an additional 2.3–3.8 Pg C if allowed to mature.

The data points all align: more CO2 is good for the Earth’s plants, which means it is good for us.

see comments on co2 bs node

February 23, 2026 — Bill Glahn

The Mexican Crisis

Featured imageLife imitates art. In the 1987 sci-fi comedy Robocop, the in-movie TV news anchor updates the future Detroit audience on breaking world news, More fighting in the Mexican crisis when American troops joined in a raid with Mexican nationals against rebel rocket positions in Acapulco. Fast forward to 2026. From CBS News, Violence erupts in Mexico after cartel leader “El Mencho” killed in military operation. CBS reports, Four soccer games »

Read more...49 Responses

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https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/12/our-sincerest-compliments-come-from-our-enemies.php

no lnx many

pOSTED ON DECEMBER 21, 2019 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN CLIMATE, LEFTISM

OUR SINCEREST COMPLIMENTS COME FROM OUR ENEMIES

Minnesota’s Democratic governor has initiated a rule-making proceeding intended to import California’s vehicle emission standards to Minnesota. Basically, a large percentage of vehicles sold in the state would have to be electric. In order to meet that mandate, electric cars would be subsidized by higher prices for gasoline-powered vehicles, the ones a large majority of people want to buy.

The rule-making order is, I think, illegal, as there is no statute that authorizes it. This will be fought out in the legal arena, with the Upper Midwest Law Center, on whose board I serve, taking the lead. Beyond the legal issue, the proposed rule is a terrible idea. It would seriously harm Minnesota consumers while having zero effect on the Earth’s climate. My organization, Center of the American Experiment, submitted a 27-page comment opposing the proposed rule, and encouraged other concerned Minnesotans to file comments opposing the rule. We provided a template letter that others could use as a comment.

Our effort was successful, as you can tell from this headline on DeSmog Blog, a house organ for the climate hysteria movement: “Public Comments Reveal Big Oil and Koch-backed Opposition to Minnesota’s Clean Car Standards.” Much could be said about this, but the point I want to make is that global warming hysterics never–and I mean never–argue their case on the merits. Instead, they invariably smear their opponents, usually by alleging that they are tools of the fossil fuel industries. That is what DeSmog did here:

A DeSmog analysis found that a majority of the hundreds of comments received were supportive of the initiative, which aims to reduce the state’s transportation-sector emissions.

However, opposing comments also poured in from industry groups and citizens borrowing a script provided by a right-wing think tank tied to the petrochemical billionaire Koch network.

That “right-wing think tank” isCenter of the American Experiment, which I run. But how, exactly, are we “tied to” the Koch network? As we approach year-end, we expect to raise around $3.3 million in 2019, of which not a single dollar, so far, has come from the “Koch network.” We are supported by thousands of individual Minnesotans, a fact with which the Left is simply unable to deal. More:

This think tank, Center of the American Experiment (CAE), has been a vocal opponent of Minnesota’s proposed clean car standards. As a member of the Koch-funded State Policy Network (SPN), the center regularly attacks clean energy and climate initiatives, just as other SPN-member organizations do in other states.

So apparently the State Policy Network has gotten support from one or more Koch-related entities. Wow. How “tied to” the Koch network can my organization get?

Don’t get me wrong: we would love to get money from Koch or other industry groups that agree with our policy positions. There is obviously nothing wrong with that, just as there is nothing wrong with “green” advocacy groups being funded by wind and solar entrepreneurs and utilities that hope to profit from “green” investments, no matter how much they hurt the utilities’ ratepayers. Almost all of the money on these issues is on the “green” side. In this case, DeSmog is simply barking up the wrong tree.

CAE misleadingly claims that Minnesota’s clean car standards would have no meaningful impact on reducing both global warming and harmful pollutants, and would force auto dealers to offer more expensive electric vehicles that consumers are unwilling to buy. These arguments appear aimed at undermining the whole point of the initiative.

They certainly are. But wait! How is the 27-page comment that we submitted “misleading”? DeSmog blog offers no clue; certainly no argument. This is not just typical, it is universal. Climate hysterics refuse to engage in debate, they just smear, pointlessly. DeSmog continues:

Many of the comments opposing the proposed standards are identical in wording, which comes from a script written by CAE’s Isaac Orr.

Isaac is a policy fellow in my organization, and one of the country’s top energy experts.

They question the legality of Minnesota adopting the standards and requests a hearing be scheduled before an administrative law judge.

That’s right. The rule-making proceeding is in fact illegal, as noted above.

Out of the more than 600 comments received (not including one supportive letter with 685 signatures and over 300 additional comments), DeSmog estimates that roughly 13 percent of them borrowed the script that Orr provided.

Thank you! We are indeed the main source of opposition to climate hysteria in Minnesota, as DeSmog acknowledges. We patiently await any argument that may come from the governor’s office, DeSmog, or anyone else, in opposition to our position. But I am not holding my breath. When we have challenged climate hysterics to debate, they have always folded. That is the state of the climate debate in 2019.

bs bk; “Marc Morano’s book Green Fraud provides a factual scientific and political account of the Green New Deal and other misanthropic and self-serving schemes of the global elite and their opportunistic or deluded acolytes.” —Will Happer,Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics emeritus, Princeton University

“Morano is truly the Pete Rose and Hank Aaron of climate contrarians.” —Steven Hayward of Power Line SAME?

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https://www.chronicle.com/article/to-court-a-secretive-donor-law-deans-at-george-mason-blasted-climate-scientists-and-their-own-accreditor/

no lnx

Chronicle.com

To Court a Secretive Donor, Law Deans at George Mason Blasted Climate Scientists and Their Own Accreditor

By Jack Stripling and Nell Gluckman

DECEMBER 18, 2019

Dean Henry N. Butler, left, and the artist Greg Wyatt unveil astatue of Antonin Scalia at George Mason U. law schoolin the fall of 2018. In the audience are Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; Chief Justice John G. Roberts and his wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts; Justice Samuel Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann Bomgardner Alito; Justice Elena Kagan, and Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Leaders of George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, which has been criticized for its ties to conservative donors, have spent years courting a wealthy Chicago philanthropist who has steered money toward organizations that promote skepticism of climate change or finance conservative and libertarian journalism on college campuses.

Newly released documents show the extent to which Barre Seid, the philanthropist, sought to engage law-school deans on hot-button political topics. On several occasions he raised alarms about political activism by climate scientists at George Mason, prompting assurances from the dean that “some of our friends on the board” were “all over it (behind the scenes).”

The documents, which include more than 800 pages of emails and other communications, were obtained through a public-records request filed by UnKoch My Campus, a national group that seeks to expose the Charles Koch Foundation’s influence on higher education.

In 2016, George Mason announced that it had received a $10 million grant from the Koch Foundation, along with $20 million from an anonymous donor, who asked that the law school be named in honor of Scalia, the late Supreme Court justice and a conservative icon. In a news release on Thursday, Allison Pienta, a lawyer working with UnKoch My Campus, argued that the documents she had obtained “prove that Mr. Seid is the Scalia Law donor.”

Taxpayers, students, Virginia citizens, we have a right to know who is donating to a public law school and asking the law school in return to serve their interest.

Pienta, who had requested records that contained the anonymous donor’s name, suspected that Seid had been the benefactor in part because people associated with him are referred to in a number of exchanges. She concluded that he was the donor after cross-referencing those emails with others that mention Seid by name.

Anne Holton, George Mason’s interim president, said in a letter to Pienta that the university could not “confirm or deny your conclusion” that Seid is the anonymous donor, “as universities have an obligation to respect a donor’s right to anonymity.”

After reviewing the records, which contained numerous redactions to protect donor privacy, The Chronicle could not independently verify the identity of the donor.What the records do show, however, is a yearslong, politically tinged dialogue between Seid and two successive deans of George Mason’s law school.

People who are concerned about undue donor influence often envision clear-cut quid pro quos or prescriptive gift agreements that grant wealthy people too much control over the academic enterprise. These documents imply a subtler form of influence, one in which a donor elevates concerns about a professor or a regulatory body just by passing information along to university decision makers.

An Activist Donor

As told through the documents, the story of Seid’s relationships with Daniel D. Polsby, former dean of the law school, and his successor, Henry N. Butler, begins at least nine years ago. By that time, Seid had already been working to transform a tiny part of the higher-education landscape. Through the Barbara and Barre Seid Foundation, he gave $825,000 to Shimer College, an institution that enrolled about 100 students and followed the Great Books curriculum. After the donation, several people with financial ties to Seid joined the college’s Board of Trustees, and a fierce battle over governance of the college followed.

(In 2017, Shimer was absorbed by North Central College, which added the Shimer Great Books School as an academic program).

Between 2011 and 2016, Seid had or had scheduled at least seven meetings with one or both of George Mason’s law deans.

The deans found in Seid an inquisitive communicator, particularly when it came to conservative causes. In 2012, for example, he wrote to Polsby asking for “any insight” into a new program, housed at George Mason, that was established by the former Republican Congressman Bob Inglis. The question was notable given Seid’s apparent interest in the politics of climate science. Inglis had been voted out of office two years earlier during his primary, largely because he supported a tax on carbon. Now he was being embraced by George Mason.

Inglis’s program, the Energy and Enterprise Initiative, was meant to “promote conservative solutions to America’s energy and climate challenges.” Polsby responded to Seid right away, appearing to distance himself and the law school from the program.

“Inglis’s new center is in a different college from us,” Polsby said. “The law school has no role and wasn’t asked before the announcement was made.”

The conversations at times took on an antiregulatory flavor. In one exchange with Seid, in 2013, Polsby launched into a broadside against the law school’s accrediting agency. The American Bar Association, he wrote, “has added all kinds of dubious nonsense in its accreditation standards.”

“Poking them in the eye,” Polsby continued, “would be a genuine pleasure.”

Seid seemed particularly curious about the powers of higher-education regulators. Who was to say whether a person could operate a school, he wondered? Did you need the state’s permission, he asked Polsby? Did you need accreditation?

The impetus for that discussion was a Chronicle article that said the state of Virginia was shutting down an unaccredited university.

‘Outrageous Behavior’

In 2015, the year Butler became dean, a controversy in climate science captured Seid’s attention. Butler assured the philanthropist that he, too, was aghast.

A group of 20 professors, including some at George Mason, signed a letter urging the Obama administration to open a racketeering investigation into fossil-fuel companies and their allies. The companies had “knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change,” the professors wrote, and could be investigated under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, commonly known as RICO.

This wasn’t the professors’ idea. Several months earlier, U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, had proposed the possibility of suing fossil-fuel companies under RICO, just as the Justice Department had done to Big Tobacco more than a decade earlier. Tobacco companies had engaged in a “massive 50-year scheme to defraud the public,” the department had argued. The same might be said of fossil-fuel companies, Senator Whitehouse wrote, which had sponsored climate-change research that contradicts peer-reviewed consensus.

Seid forwarded to Butler a blog post by Judith A. Curry, a high-profile skeptic of climate science and former chairwoman of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. Curry wrote that “the consensus on human caused climate change is not as overwhelming as you seem to think.” She admonished the professors for engaging in “irresponsible advocacy,” accusing them of trying to “silence scientists that disagree with you.”

“Is it significant that 6 GMU guys,” Seid wrote to Butler, “were the originators” of the letter.

“This is really outrageous behavior,” Butler repliedon September 18, 2015. “I do not know the GMU folks who signed the letter, but they should be embarrassed. I wonder if they really understand anything about RICO, which was the source of much abuse by prosecutors (and the plaintiffs’ bar in follow on private suits) until the Feds went totally crazy and criminalized almost all behavior (which meant there was less need to use conspiracy theories).”

A few weeks later, Seid forwarded to Butler another blog post on the same subject from Powerline, an outlet for conservative commentary.

“Not your problem — but. … ” Seid wrote to the dean.

The post, titled “An Instance of Warmist Corruption,” took aim at Jagadish Shukla, a climate scientist at George Mason and the first signatory to the professors’ letter calling for a RICO investigation. The blog described Shukla as “remarkably well paid” and suggested some form of financial malfeasance on his part.

Shukla was one of the lead authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore Jr., in 2007.

Responding to the Powerline post, Butler assured Seid that powerful people at George Mason were involved with the matter.

“This is such absurd behavior,” Butler wrote to Seid on October 9, 2015. “Totally indefensible.

“Some of our friends on the board,” he continued, “are all over it (behind the scenes).”

That same month, George Mason began an internal audit of Shukla’s handling of grants, a university spokesman confirmed to The Chronicle.

By this time, Shukla had run smack into a political buzz saw. Lamar S. Smith, a Republican Congressman from Texas, had announced plans to investigate a nonprofit research group led by Shukla.

On November 5, 2015, Seid forwarded to Butler an email about Shukla from Joseph L. Bast, then the president of the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank. Seid’s foundation has donated at least $1 million to the institute, which rejects as “propaganda” the idea of scientific consensus on the causes and consequences of climate change. George Mason’s own “multimillionaire government trough-feeder,” Bast wrote, was finally being exposed.

In response to Seid, Butler wrote, “The president is freaking out about this,” referring to Ángel Cabrera, George Mason’s president at the time.

For climate scientists like Shukla, criticism often comes with the job. But the newly released emails, Shukla told The Chronicle, suggest that those attackers had the ear of George Mason’s Board of Visitors.

“The ferocity of their attack was totally expected,” Shukla said in an email. “The fact that these guys had access to GMU board members, as the emails show, that is very unusual.”

Michael Sandler, a spokesman for George Mason, told The Chronicle that George Mason’s audit “concluded no wrongdoing on the part of Professor Shukla.”

The Chronicle requested a copy of the audit, but George Mason officials said it was a personnel record and not subject to public-disclosure laws.

As for congressional scrutiny, a politically connected board member says he came to Shukla’s defense. Thomas M. Davis III, the rector of George Mason’s board and a former Republican congressman from Virginia, said in an interview on Tuesday that he had quietly urged Representative Smith not to call a public hearing.

“I said ‘Look, lay off this guy,’” Davis said. “I made it clear we stood behind him and they ought to lay off him, and they did. I met with Shukla and told him we supported him.

“When one of our professors is under attack, either from the right or the left, we are behind them,” Davis continued.

Butler, the dean, declined an interview requestand did not answer specific questions from The Chronicle about his emails. In a statement, Butler said he had nothing to do with the university’s response to Shukla.

“I had no influence in this matter, nor did I attempt to exert any influence in this matter,” Butler’s statement reads. “I support academic freedom at George Mason University’s Scalia Law School and across the university. Academic freedom and an open marketplace of ideas, including room for robust debate, is the very foundation of higher learning.”

A spokeswoman for Tripp Lite, a manufacturing company where Seid served as president, did not respond to emails this week seeking comment from Seid, who did not respond to a phone message on Wednesday.

A University on the Defensive

For George Mason, the release of a new cache of documents related to donor influence marks a chapter in a continuing saga. For years the university has fought in courts of law and public opinion, defending its relationships with conservative philanthropists. Only recently, however, did the university acknowledge that it hasn’t always gotten it right.

Last year when Cabrera, then the university’s president, announced a review of George Mason’s gift-acceptance policies, he conceded that some of its grant agreements “fall short of the standards of academic independence.” The agreements gave donors opportunities to weigh in on faculty hiring and stated with some specificity what professors would study.

But donors can still keep their identities secret, making it difficult to discern their intent.

By channeling a gift through a third party, a donor can further obscure the source of the money. That appears to have happened at George Mason. Several of the newly released emails refer to Donors Trust, a nonprofit organization that, among other things, offers donors anonymity.

Donors Trust describes itself as a public charity that was created to work with donors who are “dedicated to the ideals of limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise.” Mother Jones described it as “the dark-money ATM of the right.” In her book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, Jane Mayer explained that donors could give to the fund, which in turn donated to conservative groups and, in effect, “erased the donors’ names from the money trail.”

That kind of opacity troubles some at George Mason, who say the public deserves more information about who may be exerting influence on a public university’s leadership and its faculty members. Pienta, the lawyer working with UnKoch My Campus, said “Mason has become basically ground zero for improper donor influence on a public institution.”

“Taxpayers, students, Virginia citizens, we have a right to know who is donating to a public law school and asking the law school in return to serve their interest,” said Pienta, a graduate of George Mason’s law school.

Virginia code, however, exempts from disclosure any records that could reveal the identity of a donor who has requested anonymity. (The state’s Supreme Court ruled last week that George Mason’s fund-raising arm is exempt from public-records laws).

It is still not clear what Seid’s involvement in renaming the law school may have been, if anything. But when the school unveiled a 4,300-pound “Bill of Rights Eagle” statue in front of its building, Butler wanted Seid to know about it.

“Yesterday was a really cool day at Scalia Law,” he wrote to Seid in May 2017, just over a year after the school was renamed. The sculptor had another project in the works, Butler explained: “a larger-than-life statue of Justice Scalia.”

Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.

Nell Gluckman is a senior reporter who writes about research, ethics, funding issues, affirmative action, and other higher-education topics. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.

Dan Bauman and Megan Zahneis contributed to this report.

A version of this article appeared in the January 10, 2020, issue.

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koch lawyer?

mayer hit

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/1/13/1469288/--Koch-Propaganda-Machine-Tries-Unsuccessfully-to-Discredit-Jane-Mayer-again

raTED UPROVEN?!

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ilhan-omar-marry-brother/

In 2016, when it looked like Ilhan Omar stood a good chance of becoming the first Somali-American elected to the Minnesota state House of Representatives, rumors swirled that she had married her brother in an illegal effort to facilitate his obtaining U.S. citizenship status.

Omar did win a seat in Minnesota’s House of Representatives, and two years later she was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Like her peer, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), Omar is young, outspoken, and champions progressive politics. And also like Ocasio–Cortez, Omar has been a frequent subject of unfounded rumors (particularly ones that have targeted her family and religious background).

The rumor about Omar’s brother that surfaced during her 2016 Minnesota campaign followed her as she assumed her new leadership role representing Minnesota’s 5th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2019:

...

The origin of the rumor captured in the above tweet is spotty. The claim first appeared in 2016 as an anonymous, since-deleted post on SomaliSpot, an online discussion forum geared toward the Somali community.Despite being unverified, the post was picked up by Powerline, a blog that “features commentary on the news from a conservative perspective,” who reported in a 12 August 2016 post that:

A reader has written us to point out that the Somali website Somalispot posted information suggesting Omar’s involvement in marriage and immigration fraud. The post notes that Omar married Ahmed Hirsi in 2002. Hirsi is the father of Omar’s three children. Omar is depicted with Hirsi and their children on Omar’s campaign website here.

The post further notes that Omar married her brother Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009, implying that the latter marriage assisted his entry into the United States. Her brother was a British citizen. “As soon as Ilhan Omar married him,” the post continues, “he started university at her [a]lma mater North Dakota State University where he graduated in 2012. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Minneapolis where he was living in a public housing complex and was later evicted. He then returned to the United Kingdom where he now lives.”

In response to the rumor, Omar issued a statement in 2016 describing the issue as one based on “a difficult part of my personal history that I did not consider relevant in the context of a political campaign,” and she labeled accusations that her former husband was also her brother “absurd and offensive.”

Omar asserted that she applied for a marriage license with her current spouse, Ahmed Hirsi, when she was 19 years old in 2002, but the couple never completed the application process for a civil marriage. Instead, Omar maintained, she and Hirsi were married in their Muslim “faith tradition.”

In 2008 Omar and Hirsi reached an “impasse” in their relationship and separated (again under Muslim custom). In 2009, Omar engaged in a civil marriage with Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, a British citizen, but they separated in 2011 (without obtaining a legal divorce), and Elmi returned to England.

In 2017, Omar formally petitioned for divorce from Elmi, whose last known location — according to Omar’s statement as recorded in Minnesota court records — was in London as of 2011. Also in 2017, Omar reconciled with Hirsi, and they officially wed in 2018. (Omar and Hirsi have three children together, two born during their initial relationship, and a third born in 2012).

We found no public records or credible sources contradicting Omar’s account of her past, nor any substantive evidence corroborating claims that Elmi is her brother or that their marriage was otherwise fraudulent. In addition, some of the claims offered in support of the rumor don’t seem to add up.

According to Omar’s proffered version of events, she fled the Somalian civil war with her family in 1991 and lived for four years in a refugee camp in Kenya before immigrating to the U.S. in 1995. Omar’s mother died when she was 2, so she and her siblings were raised by her father and grandfather. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported just before the 2018 midterm elections that:

During an interview, Omar showed a reporter cellphone photos of documents from her family’s U.S. entry in 1995 after fleeing Somalia’s civil war. She declined to provide copies of the papers, which included refugee resettlement approval forms and identification cards, but they appeared to list her father, siblings and Omar by order of birth, with Omar as the youngest of seven children. No one named Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, who is three years younger than Omar, could be seen listed in the documents.

“For someone like me, who left a war-torn country at the age of 8, who got refugee status to come to America, where in the world am I finding a sibling 15 years, 20 years later to seek to do what people accuse me of?” Omar said.

Given that Omar and her siblings all came to live in the U.S. under identical circumstances as refugees, and that Omar herself became a naturalized U.S. citizen while still a minor, how did one of her siblings end up with such a radically different immigration status that she would have needed to marry him in order to facilitate his U.S. residency application?

Also, if Ahmed Elmi were truly Omar’s brother, why would he have needed to take the drastic step of marrying her in order to secure a path to U.S. citizenship? U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) policies qualify immigrants as eligible to apply for permanent residency status (and later become naturalized citizens) if they are the “spouse of a U.S. citizen” or the “brother or sister of a U.S. citizen.” Why would Omar commit a federal crime and risk a prison sentence (and possibly her own citizenship status) in order to provide her brother with the opportunity to apply for something he would already have been eligible to seek?

Elmi reportedly attended North Dakota State University with Omar between 2009 and 2012. But as a British citizen Elmi could have studied at any university in the European Union or European Economic Area, and in some of those countries his education would have been tuition-free. Was attending school in North Dakota instead such a priority as to merit committing marriage and immigration fraud and risking a fine of up to $250,000 and five years in prison?

If Elmi was so desperate for U.S. residency/citizenship status that he engaged in a sham “marriage” with his sister in order to seek it, why did he return to England after his split with Omar? And why is there no record of Elmi’s having applied for or obtained such status if that was the whole point of his supposedly “fraudulent” marriage to his alleged sister?

In August 2016, shortly after the rumor originally surfaced, then-U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota Andy Luger countered news reports by stating in a letter sent to an attorney retained by Omar that his office was not investigating criminal accusations related to these rumors. We found no evidence this circumstance has changed (although federal prosecutors generally do not publicly comment on investigations in progress or lack thereof).

Right-leaning blogs have made a sport of digging into Ilhan Omar’s personal history, sifting through public records and surfing through social media profiles of people believed to be associated with her, and in so doing they have inevitably surfaced some yet-unanswered questions. Why did Omar’s 2016 campaign literature reference Ahmed Hirsi as her “husband” when she hadn’t yet divorced Ahmed Elmi or married Hirsi? Why did Omar say in her 2017 divorce filing that she’d had no contact with Elmi since June of 2011 when she was seemingly photographed with him in London in 2015? Why has Elmi not put the matter to rest by coming forward and explaining the nature of his relationship with Omar?

Perhaps Ilhan Omar has something untoward related to her marriages that she’s covering up. Or maybe, like countless other people, she’s had a complicated romantic past that she’d rather not discuss publicly. The evidence uncovered thus far isn’t definitive enough to come down on one side or the other.

We sent a list of questions to Omar’s spokesman but did not receive responses prior to publication. We also sent a list of questions to Powerline blogger Scott Johnson, who responded on 25 March 2019 but offered nothing more substantive in support of the claim than inference and supposition.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/ssrc-cdn1/crmuploads/new_publication_3/islamophobia-2018-midterms-ssrc.pdf

...Categories of tweets tagging Rashida Tlaib 13. PJ Media #ISLAMOPHOBIA / 19 nomination for state legislature. The article was based on an anonymous comment on a forum for the Somali diaspora, Somalispot.com.59 The post claimed, without providing evidence, that Omar’s previous husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, was actually her brother. Five days later, AlphanewsMN.com, a fringe website in Minnesota, ran a story claiming, “New Evidence Confirms Rumors About DFL Candidate’s Marriages.” Omar has repeatedly denied the allegation and has never been charged, though she has avoided addressing certain inconsistencies.60 The largest local newspaper, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, did not give credence to the claims at the time.61 Despite the fringe media allegations, the story remained unproven and essentially faded away until it was revived during the 2018 primary by PJ Media (Figure 13), a conservative news site that attracts an average of fifteen million unique readers per month62 and is rated by Media Bias/Fact Check as “right-wing” and “borderline ‘Questionable’ based on numerous failed fact checks.”63

On August 8, six days before the primary vote, PJ Media posted this story: OMAR’S MEDIA AND PARTY SUPPORTERS HAVE BEEN AGGRESSIVELY UNINTERESTED IN A DISTURBING ALLEGATION ABOUT OMAR WITH LEGAL RAMIFICATIONS: THAT IN 2009, SHE SEEMS TO HAVE MARRIED HER BROTHER. THAT ALLEGATION HAS BEEN PUBLIC FOR NEARLY TWO YEARS WITHOUT OMAR ADDRESSING ITS SPECIFIC FOUNDATIONS. NEWLY UNCOVERED EVIDENCE—EXCLUSIVELY PUBLISHED BELOW—ADDS ANOTHER ALLEGATION: ILHAN OMAR HAS SINCE SIGNED OFF ON APPARENT FALSEHOODS, UNDER PENALTY OF PERJURY, DURING HER 2017 DIVORCE FROM THE MAN IN QUESTION: AHMED NUR SAID ELMI.64 The story included copies of divorce documents and screengrabs of pictures on social media, but none of the “evidence” proved Omar’s first husband was her brother. Nevertheless, the allegation had been rereleased into the echo chamber. The same day, Robert Spencer, cofounder of Stop Islamization of America,65 reposted the story on his Jihadwatch.org website, which is dedicated to tracking the “current state of radical jihad theology and ideology.”66 Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum, which the Center for American Progress puts “at the center of the Islamophobia network,”67 also posted an excerpt of, and link to, the PJ Media story on its Islamist Watch website.68 Two days later, on August 10, Gateway Pundit, an extreme right-wing website,69 ran a headline, “Democratic Congressional Candidate from Minnesota Divorces Her Brother,” 70 which cut and pasted from the original 2016 Powerline story.

The uncorroborated story was given another boost on August 12 when media provocateur Laura Loomercrashed a joint event between Omar and Rashida Tlaib (see Appendix 2: Queen of the Trolls).71 “VIDEO: Laura Loomer Confronts Democrat Muslim Candidate on Why She Married Her Brother—Is KICKED OFF FACEBOOK after Posting the VIDEO,” Gateway Pundit reported.72 On August 16,Gateway Pundit published news that Loomer was suing Tlaib for assault allegedly committed during the confrontation, and reprinted most of the previous story.73

A week later, American thinker.com mentioned the allegation in an article on Muslims running for office nationally.74 14. Married her brother 20 / #ISLAMOPHOBIA On October 23, two weeks before the midterm election, PJ Media revived the story yet again with “exclusive new evidence” that consisted of high school records of a man by the same name as Omar’s ex-husband. The new allegations were quickly picked up by WMD.com, which reposted the first few paragraphs of the PJ Media story and then linked to the piece.75 The story set off a social media frenzy (Figure 14). A tweet linking back to the article and demanding that she be “thrown in jail or deported” was retweeted more than 5,000 times.

A Laura Loomer tweet asking, “@IlhanMN why did you marry your brother?”was retweeted 890 times over the next three days. In fact, a keyword search of the 90,000 tweets tagging @IlhanMN in the eight weeks before the election found that (after “Minnesota” and “Congress”) three of the top six words in tweets tagging Omar involved terms associated with the alleged marriage (Figure 15). The word “brother” and the terms “marry/married” appeared in more tweets—almost 16,000—than any others, followed closely by “fraud.” The way in which innuendo was a hallmark of alt-right media coverage of the allegations was reflected in an October 27 article on AlphanewsMN.com, one of the two sites that originally published the story. Under the headline “Did City Pages Expose Evidence of Ilhan Omar’s Marriage Controversy?” writer Preya Samsundar reported:

[CITY PAGES] WROTE THAT ILHAN OMAR’S FATHER IS NAMED “NUR SAID ELMI MOHAMED”. A DAY LATER, [THE] ARTICLE WAS CHANGED AND NOW OMAR’S FATHER’S NAME APPEARS IN THE ARTICLE AS “NUR OMAR MOHAMED”. WHY THE SUDDEN CHANGE? IT COULD VERY WELL BE THAT BY ADMITTING THAT ILHAN OMAR’S FATHER’S NAME IS NUR SAID ELMI MOHAMED, IT VALIDATES THE INFORMATION DISCOVERED EARLIER BY ALPHA NEWS THAT ILHAN OMAR MARRIED HER BROTHER AND COMMITTED IMMIGRATION FRAUD… THE ORIGINAL NAME USED BY CITY PAGES TO IDENTIFY ILHAN OMAR’S FATHER LENDS CREDENCE TO THE FRATERNAL STATUS OF AHMED NUR AID ELMI UNDER SOMALI NAMING CONVENTIONS. THE CHANGE WOULD ALSO REMOVE ANY SUSPICION FROM THE READER THAT OMAR MARRIED A MAN WITH AN ALMOST IDENTICAL NAME OF HER FATHER.76

But the story did not rest there. It was resurrected by another right-wing media outlet, and given credibility by Donald Trump in July 2019, the same week Trump posted a series of racist tweets about Omar. As he departed for a campaign rally at which he would again denounce Omar, prompting the crowd to break into chants of “Send her back,”77 Emerald Robinson, a reporter for the hard-right One America News Network, asked if the administration was looking into “possible immigration fraud committed by Ilhan Omar for possibly marrying her brother.”78 Trump’s response: “Well, there’s a lot of talk about the fact that she was married to her brother. I know nothing about it. I hear she was married to her brother. You’re asking me a question about it. I don’t know, but I’m sure there’s somebody who will be looking at that.” 15. Ilhan Omar network top keywords #ISLAMOPHOBIA / 21

With that, the story had been released back into the social media echo chamber with new imprimatur of credibility for those who wanted to believe it.

5.3.2 Case Study: FGM A similar twisting of facts by online outlets led to a false allegation about Omar that formed the basis of another Twitter narrative: that she supports female genital mutilation (FGM). Omar’s native Somalia has one of the highest rates of FGM in the world.79 Despite Omar’s opposition to the procedure, its high prevalence in Somalia has made the issue a potent vector for innuendo. “In 2017, Omar rejected Muslim reform-driven efforts against gender discrimination and female genital mutilation (FGM),” the website for the Clarion Project reported in August 2018.80 The group describes itself as “a non-profit organization that educates the public about the dangers of radical Islam,”81 though it is designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-Muslim hate group. This October 17 post by Laura Loomer,an influential anti-Muslim troll,

...

https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/toxic-masculinity-killing-us-many-ways

After every mass shooting—and sadly, there are so many that we have become numb to them—there’s an inevitable combing through the shooter’s past to see what could have motivated him.

We learned a lot about Omar Mateen, who shot up an Orlando, Florida, gay nightclub called Pulse in 2016. His ex-wife describes a man who was controlling and abusive. A colleague says he was always using racial and sexual slurs and "talked about killing people all the time." Both his ex-wife and his father describe him as homophobic. He was clearly fond of guns, having not one, but two concealed carry licenses. He was investigated by the FBI in 2013 for making threats to a coworker.

Stephen Paddock, who killed nearly 60 people at a country-western concert in 2017, also loved guns, amassing several dozen. He was a massive gambler who loved freebies but was rudely unwilling to tip waitresses. He dressed down his girlfriend in public for no reason, and was described by people who knew him as rigid, uncompromising, arrogant and entitled.

Elliot Rodger, who killed six and injured 14 in Isla Vista, California, was also entitled, and released a video and a manifesto explaining why he deserved female attention—and committed murder as revenge because he did not get it. And so on and so forth, with one killer after another.

There is a common theme here: Toxic masculinity.

Every time feminists talk about toxic masculinity, there is a chorus of whiny dudes who will immediately assume—or pretend to assume—that feminists are condemning all masculinity, even though the modifier "toxic" inherently suggests that there are forms of masculinity that are not toxic.

So, to be excruciatingly clear, toxic masculinity is a specific model of manhood, geared toward dominance and control. It's a manhood that views women and LGBT people as inferior, sees sex as an act not of affection but domination, and which valorizes violence as the way to prove one's self to the world.

For obvious political reasons, conservatives try to reduce conversations about public mass murder to “radical Islam,” the suggestion being that these impulses are inherent to Islam and that Christianity does not cause such violence. This, of course, is hoary nonsense, as there is a long and ignoble history of Christian-identified men, caught up in the cult of toxic masculinity, sowing discord and causing violence in our country: The gun-toting militiamen that caused a showdown in Oregon, the self-appointed border patrol called the Minutemen that again made news when their founder was convicted of child molestation, men who attack abortion clinics and providers.

Toxic masculinity aspires to toughness but is, in fact, an ideology of living in fear: The fear of ever seeming soft, tender, weak, or somehow less than manly. This insecurity is perhaps the most stalwart defining feature of toxic masculinity, and examples are endless. Donald Trump flipping out when someone teases him about his small fingers. (Or about anything, really.) The ludicrously long and shaggy beards on "Duck Dynasty," meant to stave off any connection to the dreaded feminine with a thicket of hair. The emergence of the term "cuckservative," flung around by hardline right-wingers to suggest that insufficient racism is somehow emasculating. Conservatives absolutely melting down about an Obamacare ad that suggested, gasp, sometimes men wear pajamas. (This ad traumatized them so much that many conservative pundits are still freaking out, years after the fact, that the Obama administration dared suggest the emasculating fabric of flannel pajamas ever touched the skin of the American male.)

If toxic masculinity was just about men posturing around each other in a comical fashion, that would be one thing, but this persistent pressure to constantly be proving manhood and warding off anything considered feminine or emasculating is the main reason why we have so many damn shootings in the United States. Whether it's Islamic terrorism or Columbine-style shootings or, as is the case with some of the most common but least covered mass shootings, an act of domestic violence by a man who would rather kill his family than lose control, the common theme is this toxic masculinity, a desire on the part of the shooter to show off how much power and control he has, to take male dominance to the level of exerting control over life and death itself.

Toxic masculinity is also the reason it's so easy for men with major issues to get a hold of the high-powered weaponry necessary to commit these crimes. Sure, the pro-gun movement likes to roll out a bunch of half-baked pseudo-arguments pretending at rationality to justify the lack of gun control in this country, but really, the emotional selling point of guns is that they feed the cult of toxic masculinity. Being able to stockpile weapons and have ever bigger and scarier-looking guns is straightforward and undeniable overcompensation for insecure men, who are trying to prove what manly men they are.

This issue also goes back to social and cultural forces, especially the way that the gun industry and the NRA have cultivated a culture of gun-powered macho power fantasies. The number of people who own guns has steadily declined in recent years, so the gun industry has shifted its marketing tactics.

“It's clear that the gun industry is marketing to people who are already their customer base and finding new and novel and unfortunately more dangerous weapons to sell them," Lindsay Nichols, federal policy director for the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, explained to me.

[ironic gun ad auto spam]

"The gun industry and the NRA are profiting off a sense of fear," Kris Brown, the co-president of the Brady Campaign, told me.The gun industry uses a carrot-and-stick approach to get this done. The carrot is the power fantasy—the idea that having a whole bunch of guns will make you feel manly and tough. Gun advertising also emphasizes the diverse range of technical attributes available, appealing to the "collect-'em-all" mentality. On the stick front, the NRA and other gun-industry propaganda arms have heavily promoted visions of social collapse and discord to make gun owners feel they have to buy enough weapons to start their own personal army in self-defense.

Most gun owners don't commit violent crimes, of course. But it's difficult to deny that this culture of heightened emotions and power fantasies is a huge factor in producing so many mass shootings. The gun industry's message that an arsenal of weapons makes you manly and powerful falls on the ears of unstable people every single day. Whether their motivations are rooted in domestic violence, political terrorism or just a desire to cause chaos, one thing mass shooters have in common is that they're plugged into gun industry marketing that appeals to that desire to dominate.

That's why any attempt to discuss putting even the smallest, most commonsensical restrictions on guns turns into a bunch of right-wing dudes squeeing about how the liberals are coming to taking their guns. This isn't a discussion being held on the plane of rationality, but is a psychological drama about these men's fears of emasculation, represented in an unsubtle way over their attachment to guns and their fear that liberals, stereotyped as effeminate in their imagination, are coming to steal the guns away.

What is particularly frustrating about all this is that, even though toxic masculinity is clearly the problem here, you have a bunch of conservatives running around and pushing toxic masculinity as the solution, as if all we need to end violence and terrorism is a bunch of silly posturing about who is the biggest man of all the menfolk out there.

Trump leads the pack on this, posturing about how we need "toughness," which he appears to define as a willingness to tweet ignorant, belligerent nonsense. And, of course, you have the chorus of conservatives who imbue their tokens of toxic masculinity—guns—with near-magical powers to somehow stop the violence.

"Under Florida law, guns can’t be carried into bars," John Hinderaker of Powerlinetried to argue, in response to the Orlando shooting. "So Pulse was a gun-free zone. That is one legal change that should be made."

The idea that a bunch of drunk people dancing around a nightclub are safer with loaded weapons on their bodies is clearly not coming from a rational place, but from a place of deep insecurity and gender weirdness that treats phallic symbols like they are magical totems. In reality, there was armed security at the club, an off-duty police officer who did engage Mateen, but failed to take him down. And there were lots of people who had guns in their cars at the Las Vegas shooting, but were helpless as Paddock rained bullets from above on concert-goers.

Our country is saturated in guns, and yet the mythical "good guy with a gun" who is supposed to stop these mass shootings has yet to actually be produced. That is because the good guy with a gun is a myth, propped up to justify toxic masculinity's obsession with guns, and nothing more.

The relentless drumbeat of mass shootings lays bare what damage that this kind of dominance-oriented masculinity does to our society, especially now that an overcompensating bully who is completely immersed in the discourse of toxic masculinity is the president. It's a stark reminder of why we, as a country, need to get past the politics of tough guy posturing and move towards a more thoughtful, inclusive society. One with more dancing and less waving guns around while talking about what a manly man you imagine yourself to be.

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POSTED ON FEBRUARY 26, 2015 BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN CLIMATE

PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD

Our pals at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute issued the following press release today, which I post here in full:

For Immediate Release:

February 26, 2015

Contact:

Craig Richardson

Richardson@eelegal.org

703-981-5553

Following Rep. Grijalva Inspiration, E&E Legal Files FOIA Request with the University of Delaware Seeking Records Relating to the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy

Washington, D.C. — Today, the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal), in conjunction with the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic (FMELC) and the Caesar Rodney Institute (CRI), filed a Delaware Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) with the University of Delaware related to Dr. John Byrne,Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy and Distinguished Professor of Energy and Climate Policy.

Specifically, the FOIA request seeks documents describing the University of Delaware’s policy or policies relating to disclosure applying to Dr. Byrne; records in the University’s possession relating to outside funding, grants, or other contributions made to support Dr. John Byrne’s work at or relating to the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy; records involving Dr. Byrne’s outside funding, including consulting fees, promotional considerations, speaking fees, honoraria, travel expenses, salary and other compensation or monies given to Dr. Byrne which did not originate with the University itself; financial disclosure forms in which Dr. Byrne lists the University of Delaware or the State of Delaware as his affiliation; and records reflecting Dr. Byrne’s total annual compensation for each year at the University of Delaware.

Those who have followed recent news reports may notice that this FOIA request was inspired by and even replicated the request that U.S. Representative Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) made to seven universities, including Delaware. In his letters, Congressman Grijalva notes that the “disclosure of a few key pieces of information will establish the impartiality of climate research and policy recommendations published in your institute’s name…[C]onflicts should be clear to stakeholders, including policymakers who use scientific information to make decisions.” Although the University responding to Rep. Grijalva is discretionary, processing FOIA requests from Delaware citizens is not.

“We certainly appreciate Congressman Grijalva’s rhetoric about the importance of disclosure and transparency,” said Chris Horner, E&E Legal Senior Legal Fellow and the attorney who filed the FOIA request on behalf of the three organizations. “His insistence that the Constitution compels him to demand these records — citing to no authority for why the universities should provide them — so moved us that we followed in his footsteps, if in our case by proceeding under Delaware law.”

It is possible that Representative Grijalva assumes that congressional letterhead carries authority to insist such demands be satisfied. Regardless, E&E Legal, FME Law and CRI appreciate the Congressman’s enthusiasm that the University dedicate itself to producing such records.

The groups far more narrowly tailor the period of time covered by their request, otherwise modeled after Rep. Grijalva’s nearly verbatim (also changing of course the party whose records are involved, which we are confident is not material to whether records should be released). The requesters look forward to the University of Delaware taking to heart Rep. Grijalva’s embrace of transparency, and satisfying this request made pursuant to Delaware’s statute which implements the legislature’s determination that, for institutions including the University, “it is vital that citizens have easy access to public records in order that the society remain free and democratic”. FOIA § 10001.

“We have followed Rep. Grijalva’s footsteps for our request, if under actual statutory making our request, unlike the Congressman’s, not discretionary. UDel has provided records in the past to Greenpeace, and we are confident that the State of Delaware will comply with this request,” concludes Horner.

Heh. By the way, learning some fun things about Rep. Grijalva, and his lead “investigator” for this witch hunt, Vic Edgerton, who turns out to be a former Green Party candidate for local office in Connecticut, because, he said at the time, he needed to shine a light on issues Democrats ignore. Edgerton also previously worked for Keith Ellison, and Dennis Kucinich. He clearly knows how to pick leading statesmen.

Stay tuned. More to come