RUTHFULLY YOURS

Congressman Keith Ellison is a liar and a racist.

If you listen to Ellison, which the media does, his time with the Nation of Islam, a violently racist and anti-Semitic hate group which believes that white people were created by a mad scientist and will be exterminated by UFOs, was a brief youthful mistake that he made back when he was a college student.

But Ellison appears to have been involved with the Nation of Islam for eleven years, from his time in law school to his early attempts at seeking public office, through his twenties and thirties.

Politico’s Glenn Thrush offers the aspiring DNC boss a platform in a puff piece and podcast which compares the extremist bigot’s “spiritual progression” to that of Martin Luther King Jr. Thrush prompts Ellison, “You were a young man” and asks him to explain his affinity for the racist hate group.

And right on cue, Keith Ellison begins distorting his own history. He cites the 1991 Rodney King case.

But Ellison was praising “Minister Farrakhan” and defending the Nation of Islam in 1989. Writing as “Keith Hakim”, he whined that the “sensational” news media smears the Nation of Islam as the “black Klu Klux Klan” so it never gets credit for “all of its laudable work.”

Keith Ellison doesn’t just defend the racist group and its leader. His rhetoric, denouncing Malcolm X for abandoning the “Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s legacy” is the sort of thing an NOI member would say.

And, back in 1989, Keith Ellison was already being condemned for anti-Semitism. The Minnesota Daily opinion editor, Michael Olenick, described Ellison’s writing as “a genuine threat to the long-term safety and well-being of the Jewish people, a threat that history dictates must not be ignored.”

“Time and time again my people have been slaughtered after the words of Hakim (Ellison) and those like him influenced the masses,” Olenick writes.

In a more recent comment, Olenick compared Ellison to David Duke.

Ellison tries to minimize his involvement to the Million Man March, claiming that he defended Farrakhan because it was important to “defend the person who called the March”.

Newt Gingrich has warned that the majority of President Obama’s legacy will soon be wiped out by the Trump administration.

The former House speaker made the remarks on Fox News Wednesday after he was shown a clip of Obama’s recent NPR interview where he advised Trump to go through Congress to pass policies rather than rely on executive powers because, in his words, “it’s harder to undo.”

Gingrich commented by saying, “What you’re watching is a man who realizes all of a sudden that like 90 percent of his legacy’s gonna disappear because he didn’t do the hard work of passing legislation. He didn’t reach out to work with the other side which, by the way, is also a warning to Trump…”

Gingrich then said, “Starting the opening day when Trump begins to repeal all these executive orders, it’s gonna be like one of those balloons that deflates…and down to a core to 10 or 15 percent of what he originally did. The rest is all gonna disappear within a year.”

During a speech he gave in October, Trump, stated, in fact, that one of his first 100-day priorities as president would be to “…cancel every unconstitutional executive action, memorandum and order issued by President Obama.”

Will Santa go to Chicago this Christmas? Maybe…but only if he can wear body armor. To be sure, there’s nothing funny about Santa needing to wear Kevlar TM when he goes to certain areas of the Windy City. In fact it is tragic. But for law enforcement and likely some in EMS, body armor is more than a fashion extra in Chicago, and other major cities, it is a potentially life-saving necessity, and way of life. As an aside, one has to wonder would the death count in Chicago among children, young adults, and other innocent bystanders decrease if Santa left kids Kevlar lined backpacks instead of toys, and winter coats had stab-resistant plate inserts?!

Sadly the remedy for the killing fields of Chicago may be more than Santa, or a Christmas truce can pull off. I wonder, do gang truces exist on Christmas morning? Will the bloodshed slow down this Holiday Season in Chicago or Baltimore or Detroit or…..?

Societies like nations die from within….

To be sure, what is going on in Chicago is more than a national embarrassment – assuming you read about it beyond a few sites like FSM or occasionally in the Tribune. Criminal beyond the average level of corruption of Daley and Capone infamy, take a good, long look, because a city near you or me could be next. Communities are dying from within, but poverty is only part of the problem. This is not about race, either, although some try to make it part of the divide. Chicago gun violence primarily is black on black…such bloodshed should no more be tolerated than white on black, or black on white. And more gun laws aren’t the answer; Chicago already has some of the strictest in the nation.

The sad reality folks throughout the city seem ok with the persistent decay amidst a not insignificant section of the metroplex; it is inconceivable that the majority of a community would contribute to or remain culpable in the creation of children condemned to lives of lack or danger or criminality, and incomprehensible that it is politics as usual in those communities. Tolerating such an existence, preferring it would seem to accept subsistence, or adhering to a stance that resists fresh air and help – it boggles the mind.

Ironically Chicago is also full of great universities (think adolescents with energy and ideas and sense of volunteerism), and people of wealth and generosity; people of all races, creeds, faiths, and ethnicities. Could Santa tap into these folks and catalyze greater outreach and collaboration?

Regrettably Santa, in his autobiography, as told to Jeff Guinn, notes that his powers diminish the closer he gets to war and violence. Too bad, because if ever this saintly bishop is needed, it is in the war zone of our inner cities. And make no mistake about it…many of our cities have dangerous areas that are war zones. I guess Santa will need our help!

Is it right to kill on Christmas?

In the book Home and Away by Dean Hughes, one of the characters in the story who is in a fox hole while German artillery shells threaten, asks his fellow soldier “is it right to kill on Christmas?” It is a profound question – and one I have no doubt frequently was asked in real life by many soldiers on both sides of the conflict. But one has to wonder, has that question even come to mind by the folks doing the killings in Chicago, and similar urban war zones? Have we developed citizens who no longer share a common humanity? Have we changed so dramatically since the 1940s when soldiers accustomed to death tugging at them every second could give themselves a humanity check, a morality check, a decency check amidst a bloody battle? What is wrong with society 2016 that our fellow Americans are racking up carnage that all but the most coldhearted Jihadists would denounce; do gang bangers ever wonder “is it right to kill on Christmas?”

So why focus on Santa and the killing fields of Chicago? Because I, like you, care about children. Having run programs and a free clinic for underserved kids, it becomes abundantly clear children need protection, role models, and to believe in something affirming, like the kindness manifest by an older man in a red costume. Clearly a father figure is needed in many inner cities – not a judgment, but a medical and public health assessment.

Former Red Sox star pitcher Kurt Schilling posted the following on Facebook this past April: “A man is a man no matter what they call themselves. I don’t care what they are, who they sleep with, men’s room was designed for the pe*is, women’s not so much. Now you need laws telling us differently? Pathetic.”

He followed this with a re-post of an item by someone else that showed an image of a man dressed as a woman, accompanied by the following: “Let him in! To the restroom with your daughter or else you’re a narrow-minded, judgmental, unloving, racist bigot who needs to die!!!” Mr. Schilling was fired as a sports commentator by ESPN for the posting.

I first heard of Mr. Schilling’s remarks while listening to ESPN on my car radio. I was struck by the moral certitude of the announcer, who said he would not dignify Schilling’s comments by repeating them. I wondered how he had arrived at such a high degree of certainty that anyone who chooses not to reorder his life to accommodate the men who think they are women must be morally depraved.

Surely it is reasonable to question the psychological health of any man who thinks he is a woman, or vice versa. We have believed that a person’s “gender,” as we say now, is determined by his sex for the entire history of the human race. So recently has this view been called into question that there is little, if any, science available to support the new, alternative view. And surely it is reasonable for a person to require some very persuasive science before abandoning the common sense view that no psychologically healthy man thinks he is a woman.

But persons like that sports announcer do not require science, precisely because they are not reasonable. In their readiness to accept newly-popular notions that contradict what their own minds tell them, and to do so without any supporting evidence, they are beyond the reach of reason.

They are not bothered by the illogic that transgender boys should be allowed into girls’ bath and locker rooms because they are uncomfortable around other boys, but that the girls who must accommodate them in their bath and locker rooms will just have to get over their discomfort.

And they are not bothered that Mr. Obama enacted his bathroom edict without any public discussion of the matter, and without consulting Congress, two things that any reasonable person would have insisted upon.

Indeed, in requiring its adherents to ignore their own minds-American cities have a police problem, not a black crime problem; Islam is a religion of peace, not the source of most of the world’s terrorism; social convention alone dictates that we treat men and women differently, not fundamental differences in their natures-political correctness leaves them no choice but to embrace irrationality as a principle of action. No need to think for yourself, just follow the party line.