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'Black Lives' leader defends looting in Yale lecture

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The “Black Lives Matter” leader who landed a teaching gig at Yale University delivered a lecture this week on the historical merits of looting as a form of protest, backing up his lesson with required reading that puts modern-day marauders on par with the patriots behind the Boston Tea Party.
DeRay McKesson, who was hired by the Ivy League institution’s divinity school to lecture for two days on "Transformational Leadership in the #BlackLivesMatter Movement," had students read an essay written at the height of the rioting and looting that plagued the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson just over a year ago after a white police officer shot and killed a black man.
“The mystifying ideological claim that looting is violent and non-political is one that has been carefully produced by the ruling class because it is precisely the violent maintenance of property which is both the basis and end of their power,” reads the August, 2014 post from the literary magazine “The New Inquiry” entitled “In Defense of Looting.” “On a less abstract level there is a practical and tactical benefit to looting. Whenever people worry about looting, there is an implicit sense that the looter must necessarily be acting selfishly, ‘opportunistically,’ and in excess.”
McKesson appears to have veered off of his syllabus for the lesson, which prompted some critics to offer a reminder that looting does indeed have innocent victims.
“There is zero justification for stealing private property and destroying a family’s livelihood – which is what occurred countless times in Ferguson, Baltimore, and elsewhere – but that’s apparently what passes as an example of ‘transformational leadership’ at the Yale Divinity School,” said Kyle Olson, founder of EAGnews.org, a blog that focuses on education reform.
"The article in question was not on the syllabus," a Yale Divinity School official confirmed. "But the instructor did send out some supplemental readings later in the process, including that particular article. We believe it's important for students to examine a wide range of viewpoints and ideas."

“There is zero justification for stealing private property and destroying a family’s livelihood.."
- Kyle Olson, EAG news

McKesson was asked to teach a one-credit course this fall as a guest lecturer. In accepting the offer, McKesson joined Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., and the Rev. Nancy Taylor, whose Old South Church in Boston is located near the site of the 2013 marathon bombing, to teach a special three-section course as part of a new leadership program. The special course was administered through the YDS’ Transformational Leadership for Church and Society program. Each of the one-credit courses is being taught by a different guest lecturer and the program is funded through a $120,000 grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.
McKesson last worked in the Minneapolis public school system as a human resources administrator. According to his LinkedIn profile, his only teaching experience was between May 2007 and June 2009, when he was a middle school math teacher.
McKesson defended the lesson when asked about it by FoxNews.com.
“The relationship and tension between protest and property destruction is something that America has grappled with since the Revolutionary War & the Boston Tea Party,” he said via Twitter to FoxNews.com. “The reading ... allowed us to explore all sides of the American historical relationships and tensions present in protest.”
The Yale Divinity School official told FoxNews.com he could not comment on the seminar but did provide a copy of the syllabus for McKesson’s section of the two-day intensive course.
Readings for the course included Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book “Between the World and Me,” a Huffington Post article titled “How The Black Lives Matter Movement Changed the Church,” the book “Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfilled Hopes for Racial Reform,” by author Derrick Bell,” Leah Gunning Francis’ book “Ferguson & Faith: Sparking Leadership and Awakening Community,” and a New York Times article titled “Our Demand Is Simple: Stop Killing Us.”

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News of the reading material, which was not included on the syllabus, first surfaced during a live tweet of the seminar from an attendee.

The school does not endorse all the positions of the many speakers who come here each year,” the school official said of the course material.
He also pointed out that school officials in attendance relayed to him that there was no one in the room who spoke out in favor of looting when the article was being discussed.
McKesson’s credentials and the new coursework make it unlikely students at the vaunted New Haven, Conn., school are getting their money’s worth, said Olson.
“It’s surprising to me students would pay tuition – and likely incur much of that in debt – and be fed a line that crime pays, other people are to blame for one’s own problems, and that the system is rigged in favor of white people,” Olson said.
“None of this propaganda will fix one broken family, heal one fatherless family or help one more child learn how to read and become a productive citizen,” he added.

EXCLUSIVE: U.S. officials conclude Iran deal violates federal law

Some senior U.S. officials involved in the implementation of the Iran nuclear deal have privately concluded that a key sanctions relief provision – a concession to Iran that will open the doors to tens of billions of dollars in U.S.-backed commerce with the Islamic regime – conflicts with existing federal statutes and cannot be implemented without violating those laws, Fox News has learned.
At issue is a passage tucked away in ancillary paperwork attached to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, as the Iran nuclear deal is formally known. Specifically, Section 5.1.2 of Annex II provides that in exchange for Iranian compliance with the terms of the deal, the U.S. “shall…license non-U.S. entities that are owned or controlled by a U.S. person to engage in activities with Iran that are consistent with this JCPOA.”
In short, this means that foreign subsidiaries of U.S. parent companies will, under certain conditions, be allowed to do business with Iran. The problem is that the Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act (ITRA), signed into law by President Obama in August 2012, was explicit in closing the so-called “foreign sub” loophole.
Indeed, ITRA also stipulated, in Section 218, that when it comes to doing business with Iran, foreign subsidiaries of U.S. parent firms shall in all cases be treated exactly the same as U.S. firms: namely, what is prohibited for U.S. parent firms has to be prohibited for foreign subsidiaries, and what is allowed for foreign subsidiaries has to be allowed for U.S. parent firms.
What’s more, ITRA contains language, in Section 605, requiring that the terms spelled out in Section 218 shall remain in effect until the president of the United States certifies two things to Congress: first, that Iran has been removed from the State Department’s list of nations that sponsor terrorism, and second, that Iran has ceased the pursuit, acquisition, and development of weapons of mass destruction.
Additional executive orders and statutes signed by President Obama, such as the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, have reaffirmed that all prior federal statutes relating to sanctions on Iran shall remain in full effect.
For example, the review act – sponsored by Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tennessee) and Ben Cardin (D-Maryland), the chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the Foreign Relations Committee, and signed into law by President Obama in May – stated that “any measure of statutory sanctions relief” afforded to Iran under the terms of the nuclear deal may only be “taken consistent with existing statutory requirements for such action.” The continued presence of Iran on the State Department’s terror list means that “existing statutory requirements” that were set forth in ITRA, in 2012, have not been met for Iran to receive the sanctions relief spelled out in the JCPOA.
As the Iran deal is an “executive agreement” and not a treaty – and has moreover received no vote of ratification from the Congress, explicit or symbolic – legal analysts inside and outside of the Obama administration have concluded that the JCPOA is vulnerable to challenge in the courts, where federal case law had held that U.S. statutes trump executive agreements in force of law.
Administration sources told Fox News it is the intention of Secretary of State John Kerry, who negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran’s foreign minister and five other world powers, that the re-opening of the “foreign sub” loophole by the JCPOA is to be construed as broadly as possible by lawyers for the State Department, the Treasury Department and other agencies involved in the deal’s implementation.
But the apparent conflict between the re-opening of the loophole and existing U.S. law leaves the Obama administration with only two options going forward. The first option is to violate ITRA, and allow foreign subsidiaries to be treated differently than U.S. parent firms. The second option is to treat both categories the same, as ITRA mandated – but still violate the section of ITRA that required Iran’s removal from the State Department terror list as a pre-condition of any such licensing.
It would also renege on the many promises of senior U.S. officials to keep the broad array of American sanctions on Iran in place. Chris Backemeyer, who served as Iran director for the National Security Council from 2012 to 2014 and is now the State Department’s deputy coordinator for sanctions policy, told POLITICO last month “there will be no real sanctions relief of our primary embargo….We are still going to have sanctions on Iran that prevent most Americans from…engaging in most commercial activities.”
Likewise, in a speech at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy last month, Adam Szubin, the acting under secretary of Treasury for terrorism and financial crimes, described Iran as “the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism” and said existing U.S. sanctions on the regime “will continue to be enforced….U.S. investment in Iran will be prohibited across the board.”
Nominated to succeed his predecessor at Treasury, Szubin appeared before the Senate Banking Committee for a confirmation hearing the day after his speech to the Washington Institute. At the hearing, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) asked the nominee where the Obama administration finds the “legal underpinnings” for using the JCPOA to re-open the “foreign sub” loophole.
Szubin said the foreign subsidiaries licensed to do business with Iran will have to meet “some very difficult conditions,” and he specifically cited ITRA, saying the 2012 law “contains the licensing authority that Treasury would anticipate using…to allow for certain categories of activity for those foreign subsidiaries.”
Elsewhere, in documents obtained by Fox News, Szubin has maintained that a different passage of ITRA, Section 601, contains explicit reference to an earlier law – the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, on the books since 1977 – and states that the president “may exercise all authorities” embedded in IEEPA, which includes licensing authority for the president.
However, Section 601 is also explicit on the point that the president must use his authorities from IEEPA to “carry out” the terms and provisions of ITRA itself, including Section 218 – which mandated that, before this form of sanctions relief can be granted, Iran must be removed from the State Department’s terror list. Nothing in the Congressional Record indicates that, during debate and passage of ITRA, members of Congress intended for the chief executive to use Section 601 to overturn, rather than “carry out,” the key provisions of his own law.
One administration lawyer contacted by Fox News said the re-opening of the loophole reflects circular logic with no valid legal foundation. “It would be Alice-in-Wonderland bootstrapping to say that [Section] 601 gives the president the authority to restore the foreign subsidiary loophole – the exact opposite of what the statute ordered,” said the attorney, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations over implementation of the Iran deal.
At the State Department on Thursday, spokesman John Kirby told reporters Secretary Kerry is “confident” that the administration “has the authority to follow through on” the commitment to re-open the foreign subsidiary loophole.
“Under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the president has broad authorities, which have been delegated to the secretary of the Treasury, to license activities under our various sanctions regimes, and the Iran sanctions program is no different,” Kirby said.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the G.O.P. presidential candidate who is a Harvard-trained lawyer and ardent critic of the Iran deal, said the re-opening of the loophole fits a pattern of the Obama administration enforcing federal laws selectively.
“It’s a problem that the president doesn’t have the ability wave a magic wand and make go away,” Cruz told Fox News in an interview. “Any U.S. company that follows through on this, that allows their foreign-owned subsidiaries to do business with Iran, will very likely face substantial civil liability, litigation and potentially even criminal prosecution. The obligation to follow federal law doesn’t go away simply because we have a lawless president who refuses to acknowledge or follow federal law.”
A spokesman for the Senate Banking Committee could not offer any time frame as to when the committee will vote on Szubin’s nomination.

The billionaire CEO who says he'll leave the country if Trump is elected ( What the Left has to Say.)

What would media mogul Barry Diller do if Donald Trump is elected president? "I'll either move out of the country or join the resistance."

But he's convinced he won't have to do either, saying he would take any bet that Trump will not be elected.

"Truly, I'm not moving, and I don't think I'm joining the resistance," he said in an interview with Bloomberg.
Diller is CEO of IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI), the conglomerate of new media businesses from Match.com to The Daily Beast to HomeAdvisor.com. Forbes estimates his net worth at $2.5 billion, while it puts Trump's wealth at $4.5 billion.
Diller attributes Trump's success in the polls so far to the "a phenomenon of reality television as politics." And he said that Trump has learned from "The Apprentice" that good reality television is built around conflict.
"Donald Trump, all he is is about conflict, and all that he is is negative conflict,' Diller said. "He's a self-promoting huckster who found a vein. A vein of meanness and nastiness."
Diller has a long track record contributing to Democratic candidates. In the 2008 election he contributed to numerous Democratic candidates including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. But he also gave money to Republican presidential candidate John McCain, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks donations and lobbying. So far in this election cycle he has not made any contributions.

Next man up? House GOP pushes reluctant Ryan to seek Speaker's chair

Since House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., shocked his congressional colleagues early Thursday by withdrawing his name from consideration to replace John Boehner, R-Ohio, as Speaker of the House, Republicans have launched a relentless press aimed at convincing House Ways and Means Committee chair Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to put himself forward for the job.
Fox News has learned that Boehner himself is imploring Ryan, Mitt Romney's running mate on the 2012 Republican presidential ticket, to put himself forward for the top job in the House, largely because Ryan is one of the few unifying figures in the House Republican Conference.
"It could be a couple of days, but there is a full-court press. Ryan's the consensus candidate", a senior Capitol Hill source told Fox News.
The list of endorsements for Ryan also includes McCarthy, who told the Wall Street Journal, "I think he could unite everybody." Hours earlier, Ryan had expressed his support for McCarthy, calling him "the best person to lead the House."
Other Republicans who have pushed Ryan to run include Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., the chair of the select committee on Benghazi, who described Ryan to The Wall Street Journal as "uniquely gifted to lead." Another source told Fox that Romney himself was expected to call Ryan to ask him to run.
Ryan has consistently passed on running for high-profile Congressional positions before, including for the Senate and in other slots in the House Republican leadership. His reluctance dates back to 2008 when an attempt was made to draft him to run against Boehner after the GOP lost control of the House. There were also efforts to bring him into the leadership fold after then-Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his primary last year.

Ryan himself repeatedly denied early Thursday afternoon that he would be a candidate to succeed Boehner, who has said he would remain in his job until a new speaker was installed. The election to choose Boehner's replacement  had been set for October 29, but its date is now uncertain. It's unclear whether more candidates will enter the race or whether the field will stand as is, with Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, and Rep. Daniel Webster, R-Fla., vying for the job.
Thursday night, Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, R-Ga., told Fox News he was putting himself out as a speaker candidate but "I'd like to tell my wife first."
Ryan's denials were amplified by his spokesman, Brendan Buck, who at one point tweeted Thursday, "Geez folks, nothing has changed," an apparent reference to rumors that his boss had decided to run after all.
However, a source familiar with Ryan’s thinking believes the 45-year-old will eventually step into the fold. The source says the pressure will be “unrelenting because there is no viable alternative.” The source also noted that Ryan would have no excuse not to run for Speaker “because he can move his family to DC.” Ryan and his wife, Janna, have three children.
Late Thursday, Ryan refused to flatly rule out a bid for the Speaker's chair, telling reporters as he left the Capitol, "
"You guys are asking all these interesting questions," Ryan said, "but I don't have any interesting answers right now. "
"I think our conference will come together and unify," he added. "We'll find a way to do it."