News that isn't Susan Rice: Today's news for April 4th (Part 2)

CNN:

Why Democrats aren't worried about the 'nuclear option'

Democrats know that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is likely to respond to a filibuster of Neil Gorsuch's Supreme Court nomination by invoking the "nuclear option" and changing the way the Senate works forever.

They just don't care.

"The filibuster is such a silly, non-intuitive tactic that most people don't even believe it exists," Markos Moulitsas, founder of the liberal blog DailyKos.com, told CNN in an email.

Inside the Senate, some red-state Democrats and longtime institutionalists have fretted that mounting an all-out battle to stop Gorsuch will hurt the party's chances of winning future fights and further degrade the more deliberative chamber of Congress. The 'nuclear option' would lower the bar from 60 senators needed to break a filibuster to 51, and Republicans currently control the chamber with a 52-48 margin.

But off Capitol Hill, Democrats -- from Washington insiders to progressive activists across the country -- are sick of hearing about those precautions.

This is one case where the Democrats are being reasonable, at least on the issue of presidential appointments. Why shouldn't a simple majority be allowed for the president to appoint whomever he/she wants to whatever position?

In other news...

McClatchy DC:

U.S. sweeping up Russian hackers in a broad global dragnet

The arrests caught the Russian hackers totally by surprise. One was at a Finnish border crossing. Another was arriving at an airport in Spain. A third was dining at a restaurant in Prague. Still others were at luxury resorts in the Maldives and Thailand.

Many have now turned up in U.S. courts. The long arm of U.S. law enforcement is spanning the globe like never before to bring criminal hackers to justice.

And it may not be just about crime. The Justice Department cites fuzzy and overlapping boundaries between criminal hackers and Russian intelligence agencies, the same ones the U.S. accuses of coordinating the hacking and subsequent disclosure of emails from the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.

...The U.S. campaign leaves Russian hackers with a dilemma: If they leave the safe confines of Russia, which has no extradition treaty with the United States, or Russia’s most ardent allies, they may get picked up and sent to the U.S.

“They no longer travel, the high-profile hackers. They understand the danger,” said Arkady Bukh, a criminal defense lawyer in New York City who has defended numerous accused Russian cybercriminals.

Say what you will about the mainstream media's whining about "election hacking", at least it is giving law enforcement plenty of incentive to catch the Russian hackers whenever they can.

While the "election hacking" is just a lame excuse to cover for the Clinton campaign's lack of ethics which got put on full display, Russian hackers are responsible for plenty of other problems:

Just this week, Maxim Senakh, a 41-year-old Russian, pleaded guilty in a Minneapolis courtroom to operating a massive robotic network that generated tens of millions of spam emails a day in a zombie criminal enterprise that purportedly brought in millions in profits.

Senakh didn’t come voluntarily. He’d been visiting a sister in Finland before that country put him on a U.S.-bound plane in January, answering a U.S. extradition request.

There are several others mentioned. But it is good to see this problem is being taken seriously now, even if it is for the wrong reasons.

Finally, in other news...

New York Daily News:

Assemblyman Dov Hikind condemns 'pro-Nazi' homework assigned at New York school 

Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D-Brooklyn) is calling for the resignation of New York Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia after she defended an Oswego County school teacher’s assignment asking students to support the Holocaust as “critical thinking.”

"Had the assignment been to argue in favor of slavery or other human atrocities, would anyone dare to defend it?” Hikind charged in a statement. “I honestly couldn't believe this story when I heard it. I thought it was a sick joke."

Hikind added that the assignment was a “stab in the back to Holocaust survivors.”

Any wagers that Hikind blindly supports the mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims by American forces in the Middle East? Maybe if he understood critical thinking, he might understand why both slaughters are wrong.

This school assignment wasn't about turning students into good little Nazis. In fact, the opposite is true: With good critical thinking skills, people would be less susceptible to the kind of propaganda which creates the situations where genocides take place. It is politically correct morons like Hikind who allow totalitarian governments to come into being and thrive. They do this by encouraging groupthink, and correspondingly discourage diversity of thought. It is impossible to prevent the kind of thinking that leads to a holocaust without understanding the thought processes of the people who did it.