Happy Thursday. Remember, Mother's Day is this weekend. Here's the National-Security Threat That Keeps Lindsey Graham Up at Night In the green room at Fox News last night, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina did an effective job of freaking the rest of us out. The short version: we're likely to get hit by Islamist terrorists in the U.S. homeland again; it's probably going to come from ISIS members operating out of Syria; the national-security community is intensely concerned, and the system designed to identify, track, monitor and interdict against these aspiring terrorists is getting overloaded. Now, you can say, "Eh, we hear this kind of talk all the time." But we also have seen jihadists striking at Western targets with somewhat metronomic regularity. Before the Garland shooting, ISIS claimed responsibility for — or at least praised — attacks in Sydney, Tunisia and Libya. The Texas attack appears to be "ISIS-inspired rather than ISIS-directed," Garnstien-Ross said. "These guys didn't receive any training from ISIS." ISIS typically claims responsibility when attackers have posted messages, usually on Twitter, pledging allegiance to the group or its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Elton Simpson, one of the suspected gunmen in the Garland shooting, appeared to have communicated with at least one known ISIS member on the social networking site, the experts interviewed by NBC News said. "The only reason that Islamic State has claimed responsibility is because of the tweet from what we believe to be Simpson's Twitter account," said Charlie Winter, an NBC News counterterrorism consultant and a researcher at the London-based Quilliam Foundation think tank. Winter noted that there was no similar claim from ISIS after the Charlie Hebdo attack in January, which was later linked to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. What do the perpetrators of the Paris attack and the Garland, Texas attack have in common? They were both on watch lists. Unnerving perspective: Foreign fighters from around the globe continue to pour into Iraq and Syria to join up with the self-proclaimed Islamic State—despite ISIS's loss of two major cities, four U.S. and military officials told The Daily Beast. In fact, there is some evidence that the number of fighters from Europe has increased in the last six months, one U.S. official said, from a total of 5,000 fighters six months ago to roughly 8,000 now. In other words, there's been a 60 percent increase in these recruits in just half a year. Either way, two military officials said, there is no evidence of any change in the foreign fighter flow since ISIS last major battlefield setback, in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit. "The recruitment channels continue unabated," the U.S. official explained. Stay safe out there. What Is a Fitting Fate for Tom Brady, History's Greatest Monster? You know my tough-on-ball-inflation-crime policy: a lifetime ban for all of the New England Patriots players, disband the franchise, vacate all the wins going back to their founding, demolish Gillette stadium, salt the earth, send the fan base to reeducation camps, and erase all historical records of the franchise ever existing. Anything less is just a slap on the wrist. Actually, we'll probably see a couple of fines. Maybe Commissioner Roger Goodell will get really tough and suspend Tom Brady for a preseason game. It turns out that a pair of low-level Patriots staffers were the two-bit Watergate burglars in this case, and that Brady -- not Belichick -- was the tragic Nixonian figure who allowed his unyielding drive to win to blur the line between right and wrong. Appointed by the NFL to find out if New England had intentionally deflated footballs used in its AFC Championship Game rout of the Indianapolis Colts, Ted Wells concluded it is "more probable than not" that Jim McNally, the officials locker room attendant for the Patriots, and John Jastremski, an equipment assistant for the team, did tamper with game balls after they were examined by officials. "Based on the evidence," the report reads, "it also is our view that it is more probable than not that Tom Brady (the quarterback for the Patriots) was at least generally aware of the inappropriate activities of McNally and Jastremski involving the release of air from Patriots game balls." Yeah, Brady was "generally aware" of these activities like he's generally aware he's married to a Brazilian supermodel, or like he's generally aware he's tied with his idol, Joe Montana, with four Super Bowl rings. Wells concedes that he's not certain when the Patriots staffers started running this shell game, and that there is less direct evidence linking the quarterback to the deception than there is linking McNally and Jastremski. But then again, the report states, "Brady is a constant reference point in the discussions between McNally and Jastremski about inflation, deflation, needles and items to be received by McNally." Brady's taken his fair share of hits over the years, but he's never been sacked like this. Most of my furious reaction is tongue-in-cheek, but you have to wonder how Brady's long-term reputation will be affected by his lack of cooperation with the league's investigation. I saw Patriots fans on Twitter echoing owner Robert Kraft's claim that the report didn't prove anything, but when you have two guys texting back and forth that Brady is telling them how to inflate the balls, and Brady refuses to turn over his phone messages . . . come on. Brady denied knowledge of any wrongdoing to league investigators, yet declined to provide those investigators with texts and emails related to the case. The report cites data retrieved from Jastremski's phone in describing a "material increase" in the communication between the staffer and the quarterback after the allegations of tampering became public on Jan. 19. "After not communicating by telephone or text message for more than six months . . . Brady and Jastremski spoke by telephone at least twice on January 19 (calls lasting a total of 25 minutes and 2 seconds), twice on January 20 (calls lasting a total of 9 minutes and 55 seconds) and twice on January 21 (calls lasting a total of 20 minutes and 52 seconds)," the report states, "before Jastremski surrendered his cell phone to the Patriots later that day for forensic imaging. . . . Brady also took the unprecedented step of inviting Jastremski to the QB room (essentially Brady's office) in Gillette Stadium on January 19 for the first and only time that Jastremski can recall during his twenty-year career with the Patriots, and Brady sent Jastremski text messages seemingly designed to calm Jastremski ('You good Jonny boy?'; 'You doing good?')." Wells doesn't believe a pair of underlings would deflate footballs without Brady's knowledge and consent, and really, what right-minded person would? A Lot of People Are Going to Want to Try to Ignore the U.S. Supreme Court Behold, the inevitable result of judicial activism, and judges rewriting laws and inventing rights in a dramatically different manner than those outside the legal community, revealed in an interview with Mike Huckabee: In Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. makes the case there comes a time when people of conscience have a moral obligation to practice civil disobedience against "unjust laws." Do you agree with that? For example, is there anything a court could try and impose upon you as a president that you morally would refuse to comply with? Dr. King's letter quoted extensively St. Augustine, who developed the doctrine of just and unjust laws. And the necessity to not abide by unjust laws, which as Augustine and King both concurred, "Are not laws at all." Court decisions that defy the Constitution, or the laws of nature or nature's God, do not constitute a legal or moral obligation to comply. In addition, the Constitution doesn't recognize a court—any court, including the Supreme Court—as having absolute power to make a law. In fact, the false doctrine of "judicial supremacy" is in itself unconstitutional, and defies the balance and separation of powers clearly outlined in our law. Unless the people's representatives pass enabling legislation and a president signs and agrees to enforce it, there IS no law. Mmm . . . when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education, weren't they striking down a law, with the people's representatives not yet passing enabling legislation to replace it? In several cases, such as Orval Faubus and George Wallace, the people's representatives resisted the decision pretty strongly! (And that was a 9-0 decision!) Part of the American system of government is that when the Supremes rule that something's unconstitutional, everyone proceeds as if it's unconstitutional, and the lawmakers have to replace it with something that is constitutional under the court's interpretation. If you like the "Supreme Court as umpire calling balls and strikes" analogy, you can't decide in the fourth inning that the home plate umpire sees the strike zone as being far too wide and you're not going to recognize his declarations of strikes. Back in January, Allahpundit heard similar remarks from Huckabee in an interview with Hugh Hewitt and concluded: Hewitt, a con law professor, understands all this. That's why you find him prodding Huckabee near the end here about the Supremacy Clause. If the U.S. Constitution is the supreme law of the land and the Supreme Court says that the Equal Protection Clause means X, then state governments are going to be living under a regime where X is the law whether they like it or not. I think Huckabee understands it too: Governing a state for 10 years, you're apt to pick up the basics of constitutional law. What he's really doing here in imagining a "confrontation" with the Court, I take it, is implying that state employees should respond to SCOTUS's ruling with forms of civil disobedience. The state legislature could re-pass a law limiting marriage to one man and one woman, even though it'll be unenforceable. County clerks could decide, in Huck's words, that the Court isn't right and then quit their jobs in protest. None of that's going to happen on a mass scale but it benefits him politically to float the idea. ADDENDA: Rick Santorum said on Greta last night that he'll announce his decision on a presidential bid in Butler, Pennsylvania on May 28. The man is a fearless iconoclast. He likes his Primanti Brothers sandwiches to have the coleslaw and French fries on the side. | 
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