RUTHFULLY YOURS

Incoming Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) says he’s backing a Minnesota congressman to lead the Democratic National Committee for a simple reason: because Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) likes him.

Schumer, in an interview Friday, said he’s supporting a bid by Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) to run the DNC because he comes with the support of Sanders, a key liberal voice in the Senate who also earned a spot this past week on Schumer’s new 10-senator leadership team.

Schumer is set to become the first New Yorker and first Jewish man to serve as a Senate leader and has been a staunch defender of Israel throughout his four decades in public service. But Ellison has been an outspoken critic of Israel and its relationship with Palestinians in the past.

Earlier in his career, Ellison apologized for or withdrew a number of controversial statements, including likening former president George W. Bush’s consolidation of power after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks to the rise of Adolf Hitler, to defending the leader of the Nation of Islam, to labeling his own 2012 reelection opponent a “lowlife scumbag.”

[Keith Ellison would be a bold pick for DNC chair — and a controversial one]

Some of those moves would seem to put him at odds with Schumer, his strong support for Israel and the strong support he enjoys from Jewish voters across New York.

“I’m not worried about the Israel stuff even though he and I disagree,” Schumer said Friday when asked about Ellison’s past statements.

So your candidate lost. You have a right to be upset, frustrated and angry, but you also have an obligation to be respectful to others and to the will of the American people. Intellectual hypocrisy continues every day on campuses, where opinions that are not the norm are vilified or silenced.

Imagine if you treated people of different races as you treat people with different opinions. There would be a tremendous outcry! But somehow it is fine to discriminate against those with different views.

Did it ever occur to you that this may be why people voted for Trump? That it might not have been the â€racist proclivities of the U.S. or the dangerous nationalism of the people, but that it was people who tell them not to think or speak the way they do.

Trump won, and he did not overthrow the government or kill people to silence them. He won in the standard fashion by gettinng 270 votes in the Electoral College. As I said, you have a right to be upset, but what we have on our hands now is an embarrassment.

And this does not lie only with the undergrads. Universities themselves are making all types of provisions to coddle those who have been traumatized by the will of the American people. At Harvard, the Introduction to Economics midterm was made optional; the reason provided was that the election results came in too late, but we all know it would have been mandatory if Clinton had won by 10 p.m., as expected.

If the faculty was worried about students not getting enough sleep the night before the exam, then the exam should have been scheduled for a different day. A note to all faculty: If you did not know, the election is the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. It was going to go one way or the other, and the undergrads and faculty should have known that and been prepared for any result. The Economics Department’s decision to make the midterm optional has set a bad precedent. Does this mean that whenever someone is upset, he/she can opt out of taking an exam? If you had the hubris to make the midterm the day after the election, you should have stuck with your decision instead of capitulating to the hysteria of the Flowers.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground.

The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

JUST FOR THE RECORD: This is where Mike Pompeo stands on Israel

Withhold UN funding until voluntary and program-specific. (Aug 2011)
Rated -5 by AAI, indicating an anti-Arab anti-Palestine voting record(May 2012)
Oppose Arms Treaty that limits gun trade to Israel & Taiwan. (Nov 2012)
President-elect Donald Trump said Friday he will nominate Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency, which would place the former Army officer and five-year member of Congress at the helm of the spy agency that has been heavily involved in global counterterrorism operations since the 2001 terror attacks.

Name: Mike Pompeo Age: 52Education: U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Harvard Law School

Background: After graduating from West Point, Mr. Pompeo served as a cavalry officer “patrolling the Iron Curtain” before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and he served with the 2nd Squadron, 7th Cavalry in the Fourth Infantry Division, according to the biography on his congressional website. He went to Harvard after he left active duty, later returning home to Kansas to run two small businesses before he was elected to the House in 2010 as part of the tea-party wave. He is a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee and the House Intelligence Committee, and he was a member of the special committee investigating the 2012 attacks on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.

Outlook: Mr. Pompeo would take the reins of the CIA as Mr. Trump said on the campaign trail he wanted to bring back the practice of harsh interrogation methods including waterboarding and “a hell of a lot worse,” as well as refilling the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with prisoners.
Those views have prompted some concern among former military officers and intelligence officials. The current CIA director, John Brennan, in 2014 publicly distanced the agency from its use of the controversial interrogation techniques after a scathing Senate report found them to be ineffective.

While in Congress, Mr. Pompeo emerged as a staunch critic of the Obama administration’s pursuit of an agreement with Iran to curb its nuclear program in exchange for relief from economic sanctions. After Republicans failed to scuttle the deal, Mr. Pompeo became active in the push to hold Iran to account for noncompliance and repeatedly has pledged to work to undo the deal. At the CIA, he would have more access to secret information about Iran’s activities since the deal took effect earlier this year. CONTINUE AT SITE