RUTHFULLY YOURS

Guess it depends on what you mean by “authoritarian.”

During the election, Donald Trump was routinely likened to Hitler. The headlines suggest not much has changed.

From the New Republic: “Donald Trump Is Already Acting Like an Authoritarian.” National Public Radio: “Donald Trump: Strong Leader or Dangerous Authoritarian?” The New York Times: “Beyond Lying: Donald Trump’s Authoritarian Reality.” The New Yorker: “Trump’s Challenge to American Democracy.”

What’s striking here is that the same folks who see in Mr. Trump a Mussolini in waiting are blind to the soft despotism that has already taken root in our government. This is the unelected and increasingly assertive class that populates our federal bureaucracies and substitutes rule by regulation for the rule of law. The result? Over the Obama years, the Competitive Enterprise Institute reckons, Washington has averaged 35 regulations for every law.

In the introduction to its just-released report on how to address this federal overreach, CEI President Kent Lassman puts it this way: “It is time for a reckoning.”

Philip Hamburger is a law professor at Columbia and author of “Is the Administrative State Unlawful?” He believes the president-elect’s cabinet selections thus far—Scott Pruitt for the Environmental Protection Agency, Betsy DeVos for Education, Ben Carson for Housing and Urban Development, Andrew Puzder for Labor—may give Mr. Trump a unique opening not only to reverse bad Obama rules but to reform the whole way these agencies impose them. If Mr. Trump really hopes to drain the swamp, says Mr. Hamburger, cutting these agencies back to constitutional size would be a terrific start.

For one thing, almost all these departments are legacies of some progressive expansion of government. While an uneasy William Howard Taft, for example, made Labor its own cabinet office on the last day of his presidency, Woodrow Wilson named its first secretary.

Meanwhile, HUD is a child of LBJ’s Great Society. The EPA was Nixon’s attempt to buy liberal approval for his administration. As for the Education Department, it was a reward from Jimmy Carter for the endorsement the National Education Association gave him in 1976. At the time this cabinet seat was established, even the New York Times called it “unwise” and editorialized against it.
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There’s a good case that Americans would be better off without most of these departments meddling in our lives and livelihoods, however politically unfeasible this might be. The next best news, however, is that Mr. Pruitt, Dr. Carson, Mr. Puzder and Mrs. DeVos are not beholden to the orthodoxies that drive the rules and mandates these bureaucracies impose.

Mrs. DeVos, for example, has spent her life promoting school choice, and her husband founded a charter school. It is difficult to imagine an Education Department under Secretary DeVos ever sending out a “Dear Colleague” letter to bully universities into expanding the definition of sexual harassment and then encouraging them to handle allegations in a way that has turned many campus tribunals into Star Chambers. Not to mention making a federal case about bathrooms. CONTINUE AT SITE

THIS IS A WAIT AND SEE NOMINATION….HOW WILL HE RESTRUCTURE THE STATE DEPARTMENT….RSK

WASHINGTON—President-elect Donald Trump will name Exxon Mobil Corp. Chief Executive Rex Tillerson as his secretary of state, a transition official said Monday, picking a veteran chief executive who has had extensive overseas business dealings but whose relationships with foreign leaders could complicate his confirmation prospects.

Mr. Tillerson was a comparatively late entry in the secretary of state competition, but he impressed the president-elect as a successful deal-maker in what one transition aide called the “Trumpian” mold.

If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Mr. Tillerson will be the public face of a diplomatic approach that envisions more cooperation with Russia and concessions from China on trade and security matters.

Mr. Trump injected a bit of theater into what is normally a staid and behind-the-scenes process, offering personal impressions of the candidates and tweeting out his timetable for a decision.

On Sunday, he tweeted that Mr. Tillerson is a “world class player and dealmaker.”

“Stay tuned!” he wrote.

Word of Mr. Trump’s selection began leaking out Monday night.

The hot-button topic today is whether or not the Russian government hacked into the email servers of the Democrat National Committee and the Clinton campaign, and whether or not they did so to support one candidate or detract from another. While the CIA has declared it as “quite clear” that electing Donald Trump was Russia’s goal, the FBI calls the evidence “fuzzy” and “ambiguous.” The only thing that is clear is that there is no definitive evidence to deduce anything.

These divergent conclusions by the FBI and CIA reflect the cultural differences in the two organizations. While the CIA is adept at drawing conclusions based on probability, inference and established behavior, the FBI – who recently came under-fire for not acting on overwhelming evidence of criminal acts in the Clinton email scandal, in true law enforcement form, relies on the weight of evidence; evidence required at a threshold to “convict.” The CIA’s conclusion, additionally, demonstrates that the Agency is willing to delve into American politics through the advancement of its conclusions.

While the federal law enforcement and intelligence communities debate the merits of the facts that have brought them to their respective conclusions, the mainstream media has already decided that the Russian did, in fact, commit cyberattacks and hacks upon the DNC and Clinton campaign. The only question they are asking is what the Russian motives might have been: To damage Clinton, aid Trump or attack the American election process as an institution.

It is undeniable that the Russian hacks – if in fact it was the Russians who hacked into the DNC and not “black hat” independent hackers or another nation State using Russian hacker fingerprints – exposed a wholly unethical and, in fact, criminal mindset deemed acceptable for American electoral politics by the Democrats, Progressives and the Clintons.

In the hacking of the DNC it was exposed that the Democrat hierarchy was quite alright with weighting the Primary Election in favor of one candidate over another. In stepping down from the post of DNC Chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz tacitly acknowledged that a culture of oligarchic corruption schemed to disenfranchise almost half of the Democrat rank-and-file. This conspiracy to defraud the Democrat voters is, at the very least, unethical to the maximum degree. At its worst it could be criminal, although not a soul called for a criminal investigation into the matter.

Only a few weeks ago Hillary Clinton’s campaign was denouncing Donald Trump as un-American for saying the election might be “rigged.” We criticized Mr. Trump at the time. But now that Mrs. Clinton has lost, her campaign is claiming the election really was rigged, albeit for Mr. Trump by Russian meddling, and it wants the Electoral College to stage what amounts to a coup.

That’s the only way to interpret the extraordinary statement Monday by Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta endorsing a special intelligence briefing for electors a week before they cast their ballots for President on Dec. 19. He released the statement hours after 10 members of the Electoral College sent a letter to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper seeking information on foreign interference in the election to judge if Mr. Trump “is fit to serve.” One of those electors is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s daughter.
“The bipartisan electors’ letter raises very grave issues involving our national security. Electors have a solemn responsibility under the Constitution and we support their efforts to have their questions addressed,” Mr. Podesta said. “We now know that the CIA has determined Russia’s interference in our elections was for the purpose of electing Donald Trump. This should distress every American.”

What should really distress Americans is that the losers are trying to overturn the election results based on little more than anonymous leaks and innuendo. Whatever Russia’s hacking motives, there is no evidence that the emails it turned up were decisive to the election result. Mr. Podesta is citing a CIA judgment that Americans have never seen and whose findings are vaguely public only because one or more unidentified officials chose to relate them to a few reporters last week.

Much of the press is reporting these as the gospel truth, though it isn’t clear that the CIA’s judgment is even shared across the intelligence community. The FBI doesn’t share the CIA’s confidence about Russia’s hacking motive, and our sources say the evidence is thin for the CIA’s conclusion.

https://www.jcrcny.org/2016/12/7722/Attacks on Jews in the U.S. 1969-2016 « Jewish Community Relations Council

FULL REPORT:http://www.jcrcny.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/CSS-Report-2016.pdf

Take a look at the important new CSS publication, Terrorist Incidents and Attacks Against Jews and Israelis in the United States, 1969-2016, by our talented, good friend, Yehudit Barsky, with a forward by another friend, Mitchell D. Silber. The publication supplements the JCRC’s own Selective Threat Scan which was designed to assist Nonprofit Security Grant Program applicants complete the “Threat” and “Consequences” sections of the Investment Justification.

Here’s the Executive Summary of the document which aligns with JCRC’s ongoing advice:

It is vital that the American Jewish community, together with our law enforcement partners, learn the lessons of the past, understand the nature of the challenges arrayed against it, and take the proper precautions to ensure that violent acts against Jews and Jewish institutions can be prevented in the future.

Jewish targets often serve as precursors to larger attacks: Perpetrators of well-known larger attacks, such as the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, were first involved in anti-Jewish incidents.
Awareness is critical: In many of these incidents, perpetrators conducted pre-operational surveillance. Training and engagement of community members to detect suspicious activity is thus essential.
A need to invest in community security infrastructure: The Jewish community can ill afford passivity and apathy against security threats. The community should broaden its understanding of what effective security entails, and invest in initiatives that provide tangible results. Foremost amongst these strategies is ensuring community members have the training and capacity to assist in securing their own communities, and partnering more closely with law enforcement agencies.

Unfortunately, much as we do not care to admit it to ourselves, the threats are real; there have been too many incidents to deny that. Now in the second decade of the twenty-first century, we find ourselves in an era where those who promote anti-Jewish rhetoric and instigation have the technical tools to reach a broader audience in less time than ever before. In fact, as recently as March 2016, the Islamic State in Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS) publicly encouraged its followers to attack Jews and their allies, “wherever they find them.”

It is vital that the American Jewish community, together with our law enforcement partners, learn the lessons of the past, understand the nature of the challenges arrayed against it, and take the proper precautions to ensure that violent acts against Jews and Jewish institutions can be prevented in the future.