RUTHFULLY YOURS

This Thanksgiving, Americans can give thanks for the termination of one of the most pro-criminal administrations in American history, though the damage done to the criminal justice system may far outlast outgoing President Barack Obama’s tenure in office.

To date, President Obama has now freed more than a thousand prisoners as part of his crusade against a criminal justice system he considers to be racist.

With fewer than 60 days remaining in his second and final term of office, the most felon-friendly president in American history just “reduced the sentences of 79 people in prison for non-violent drug crimes,” bringing his total to 1,023 commutations of prison sentences, Quartz reports.

“Unlike pardons, commutations don’t officially constitute forgiveness of a crime. They reduce a prisoner’s sentence but don’t necessarily let them go free immediately. The details of the most recent 79 commutations weren’t immediately clear.”

The 1,023 figure does not include the 6,112 allegedly non-violent drug offenders freed a year ago under retroactively applied federal sentencing guidelines.

The president’s pardon power is unreviewable in any court in the land and cannot be modified by Congress. When it comes to federal offenses, the president is free to pardon or commute the sentence of anybody for anything anywhere in America.

To Obama the fact that African-Americans are the most incarcerated group in the U.S. is proof not that they commit a lot of crimes but that they are innocent victims of racist, systemic discrimination in a country where race relations haven’t improved much since Jim Crow.

Liberal foodies are crying in their craft beer about what’s to come under a Trump administration.

For the last eight years, the food movement — a collection of celebrity chefs, food writers, and organic-food executives — has been a star player in the Obama administration, dictating policies that range from expanding subsidized school meals to micromanaging food labels. These are the same folks who lecture us about what we should and shouldn’t eat, force-feed us the idea of local, organic, non-GMO food, and tie food production to climate change. And yes, they are mostly elites who vilify the people who make and grow our food (guess what, foodies? the farmers won).

All of that will likely end under fast-food lover President Trump. The president-elect said little about food policy on the campaign trail, but there’s plenty of reason to believe he will roll back some of the most ineffective policies and stop bad ones from advancing on his watch. The culinary elites were hoping to use food issues to promote their overall agenda of higher taxes and more regulations under a Clinton administration; that agenda is now toast.

Trump’s win curbs the political influence of top food activists, who were all-in on a Hillary Clinton victory. That includes celebrity chef Tom Colicchio (head of the liberal Food Policy Action group, which worked against Republican candidates), who stumped for Clinton in Pittsburgh the day before the election. In his rambling introduction, Colicchio slammed Ronald Reagan and said the Republican party “refuses to include everyone, that fights your right to vote, that is out there right now, making sure that people can’t vote” (if you’re a Republican, you might want to think twice about patronizing Mr. Colicchio’s pricy restaurants). His Twitter timeline is a non-stop rant against Trump and the GOP. A few days after the election, a still-stung Colicchio tweeted out, “Sure let’s rally around the racist” and compared the feeling in New York City to the days following 9/11.

Another food-movement leader, Stonyfield Farm chairman Gary Hirshberg, raised more than $600,000 for Clinton and is a close ally of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Hirshberg’s pet project is mandatory GMO (genetically modified organism) labels, and several e-mails released by WikiLeaks reveal that he lobbied hard to get Clinton to come out in favor of those labels (she did not). President Obama signed a GMO-labeling bill last summer, but the details still need to be worked out at the Department of Agriculture over the next two years, and Hirshberg was poised to get his way if Clinton won. Now there’s a chance that anti-labeling Republicans could reverse the policy altogether. And other Obama-era labeling laws pushed by food activists could be on the chopping block: The American Action Forum recommended last week that Congress repeal two costly labeling rules, including newly revised nutrition labels.

Throughout history, revolutionaries of all stripes have warped the meaning of words to subvert reality.

And now here we go again, with another effort — spearheaded by the media and universities — to use any linguistic means necessary to achieve political ends.

“Sanctuary city” is a euphemism for the local and state nullification of federal law — a subversive tactic that dates back to the nullification crises during the Andrew Jackson administration and, later, in the years leading up to the Civil War.

This makes a mockery of the simple constitutional principle that cities and states cannot subversively pick and choose which federal laws to obey.

The term “sanctuary” would never apply to conservative jurisdictions that in similar fashion sought to offer “sanctuary” to those dissidents who disobeyed federal gun registration, income tax, or environmental laws.

College administrators boast of offering counseling and therapeutic help to students and faculty members distraught over the recent election. They use terms like “divisive” and “polarizing” in describing the election, when in truth they wish to hide from their donors, alumni, and half the country their own abject and one-sided contempt for incoming president-elect Donald Trump.

Note that in the highly emotional elections of 2008 and 2012, universities did not offer commensurate counseling services — because their own preferred candidate won and was thus his victory was not “polarizing.” Once upon a time, campuses did not worry about whether independent faculty and conservative students were sullen and depressed in adolescent style over the implications of President-elect Barack Obama’s radical promises to “fundamentally change America.”

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei threatened a response Wednesday if the U.S. extends sanctions against his country for another 10 years, just days after the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in favor of an extension.

Mr. Khamenei, who has final say in most matters of state, didn’t say what action Iran would take if the sanctions are extended. The House voted almost unanimously last week to keep the Iran Sanctions Act in place for a decade more following its expiration at the end of this year.

Such an extension would violate the landmark nuclear deal brokered last year between Iran and six world powers including the U.S., Mr. Khamenei said in comments published to his official website, Khamenei.ir.

“If this sanction is put in place, it’s a violation of the [nuclear deal] and they should know that the Islamic Republic will certainly react against it,” he said.

Mr. Khamenei has asserted both during negotiations and after the deal was finalized that Iran would only remain committed to it as long as the U.S. and other powers honored their obligations. In June, after President-elect Donald Trump suggested reconfiguring the deal, Mr. Khamenei vowed to “light it on fire” in response.

Iran’s commitments under the deal include a reduction in the number of uranium enrichment centrifuges in operation, limits to the amount of nuclear material in its possession and international oversight of its nuclear program.

The House vote to renew the act signals wide agreement on a hard-line approach to Iran despite President Barack Obama’s nuclear diplomacy.

Mr. Trump staked out an antagonistic stance toward Iran during his presidential campaign, making criticism of the nuclear deal a familiar theme during rallies and debates. During the final presidential debate last month, he called it the “stupidest deal of all time.”