RUTHFULLY YOURS

Lee is famous for her depth of information and knowledge…. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas state that the Constitution is 400 years old. In other words, its writing would predate the Pilgrims.

In 1997, while on a trip to the Mars Pathfinder operations center in California, Jackson Lee asked if the Pathfinder had succeeded in taking a picture of the flag planted on Mars by Neil Armstrong in 1969.

In 2010 she opined ““Today, we have two Vietnams, side by side, North and South, exchanging and working.” Forgot that Vietnam was unified in 1975.

As Jonathan Strong, then of the Daily Caller documented in 2011, she constantly referred to one staff member as “You Stupid Mother f…er,” threw her cell phone at another and demanded to be chauffeured by car when travelling between House office buildings (which are connected by tunnels) and that staffers run to the supermarket at 2 a.m. to buy garlic supplements for her. rsk

— Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) took a knee on the floor of the House tonight during a special order by the Congressional Black Caucus focused on rooting out racism and defending the First Amendment.

“Someone had the lack of judgment to provoke the situation and call their mothers a name,” Jackson Lee said of President Trump using “son of a bitch” last week to refer to NFL players who knelt during the National Anthem in protest of racial injustice.

“I refuse to accept that as a standard of leadership for the highest office in the world — and even if you never understand it… if you think you’re playing to your base, if you’re not the unifier, we will continue to stand in the gap and racism is going to be under our foot,” she said. “And you know where else it’s going to be? It’s going to be under our knee. Because we in the Congressional Black Caucus have always stood for what is right… there is no basis in the First Amendment that says you cannot kneel on the National Anthem or in front of the flag.”

Jackson Lee challenged Trump to identify which players’ mothers, by using the SOB slur, he was calling bitches. “That is racism. You cannot deny it,” she said of the insult.

The congresswoman then knelt and continued her floor speech. “I kneel in honor of the First Amendment,” she said. “I kneel because the flag is a symbol for freedom. I kneel because I’m going to stand against racism. I kneel because I will stand with those young men [in the NFL] and I stand with our soldiers. And I’ll stand with America.”

CBC Chairman Cedric Richmond (D-La.) in a statement earlier today faulted NFL owners who issued statements in support of their players’ right to free speech without acknowledging why they protested. “While a few of these statements mentioned ‘social injustice,’ ‘racial divides,’ and ‘societal issues,’ none of them explicitly mentioned the reason why Mr. Kaepernick and many others (professional athletes, celebrities, elected officials, and citizens) are taking a knee during the National Anthem,” he said.

“They are taking a knee to protest police officers who kill unarmed African Americans – men and women, adults and children, parents and grandparents – with impunity. They are taking a knee to protest a justice system that says that being Black is enough reason for a police officer to fear for his or her life,” Richmond said. “Those words were missing from the statements I read despite the fact that 70 percent of NFL players are Black and many of them, as well as their family and friends, have experienced racial profiling by police that leaves too many unarmed African Americans injured or dead.”https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/2017/09/25/jackson-lee-kneels-congressional-speech-honor-first-amendment/

THANKS DPS….

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell attacked President Trump for showing a “lack of respect for the NFL” — regarding the president’s recent comments criticizing players for not standing during the national anthem — because it violated the “constitutional rights of our players,” referring to the First Amendment.

This comes from the same commissioner who threatened NFL players who wanted to honor both 9/11 victims and five police officers who were murdered in Dallas.

The Dallas Cowboys wanted to pay tribute to the five Dallas officers who were murdered at a Black Lives Matter protest on July 7, 2016. The Cowboys had been wearing a special decal on their helmets that said “Arm in Arm” that specifically honored the police officers — that is, until the NFL stepped in and stopped it.

“The NFL had an opportunity to be leaders and advocates for change in law enforcement,” Sgt. Demetrick Pennie, president of The Dallas Fallen Officer Foundation, told TMZ at the time. “These are our friends and our loved ones … it hurts to not have the NFL fully support us.”

Nationally syndicated conservative talk-radio host, Mark Levin, fumed over the decision by the NFL, calling it “embarrassing” and “disgraceful”:

Let me tell you why the NFL won’t do this. Anyone have a guess? I have a big guess: Because they don’t want any trouble from the leftists, from the Black Lives Matter crowd. I know exactly what’s going on here. Like Hillary Clinton doesn’t seek the endorsement from the cops union. Of course not. The Democrat Party’s gone. And the NFL top brass, like the NBA top brass, like baseball top brass, all liberal Democrats. [Every] damn one of them, pretty much.

Even more disgusting was the NFL’s response last September to players who wanted to honor the thousands of Americans who were murdered by Islamic terrorists on 9/11.

“Avery Williamson, a starting linebacker for the Tennessee team, hoped to wear a pair of specially-designed cleats at his team’s home opener Sunday against the Minnesota Vikings on the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, but he backed off when a league rep vowed to fine him for violating the league’s uniform code,” the New York Post reported.

An ancient Chinese philosopher once said, “May you live in interesting times.” Congratulations, we’ve hit the jackpot.

We are in the beginning phase of Obamagate. This is our generation’s Watergate. Except far worse.

Here’s a refresher course for those too young to remember. Watergate was the biggest scandal in modern political history. Republican President Richard Nixon desperately wanted to know what Democrats were planning for their 1972 presidential campaign against him. He ordered a team of trusted aides to spy on them. They literally broke into the offices of the Democrat National Committee inside the Watergate Building. That was the beginning of the end for Nixon.

But today no one needs to physically break into an office to spy on a political rival. All you have to do is use the high-tech electronic power of government. A corrupt president can use the government to listen in on anyone, anytime.

The media and liberal critics went ballistic when Donald Trump tweeted in March that Barack Obama spied on him. CNN tweeted, “Trump’s baseless wiretap claim” and, “Trump just flat-out lied about wiretapping.” Well guess who was right? Trump — again.

According to multiple media reports out last week, officials in the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign. They wiretapped Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort both before and after the election. It appears other top Trump aides were also wiretapped, as was Trump Tower.

If these media reports are proven true, then the Obama administration was spying on the entire Trump campaign staff. Even if they were listening in on only Manafort, to whom do you think he was speaking? Trump and every high-ranking member of Trump’s campaign staff.

Which means while government agents were supposedly listening for “criminal activity,” they just happened to hear every plan of the Trump campaign … they just happened to know what would be in Trump’s speeches … they knew his line of attack versus Hillary … they knew his debate prep … they knew everything Trump was planning before he did it. That’s some valuable inside information.

Obama just happened to pick the perfect guy to spy on — if he wanted to fix the election for Hillary.

If you want a perfect metaphor for our national moment, it’s Steelers offensive tackle Alejandro Villanueva coming out onto the field for the national anthem while the rest of his team stayed in the locker room.
Asked about it after the game, coach Mike Tomlin simply referred to an earlier statement on the reasoning for keeping the team in the locker room while the Star Spangled Banner played: he wanted the team to be unified in whatever it chose to do. “People shouldn’t have to choose,” Tomlin said. “If a guy wants to go about his normal business and participate in the anthem, he shouldn’t be forced to choose sides. If a guy feels the need to do something, he shouldn’t be separated from his teammate who chooses not to.” But as Villanueva seems to have recognized, staying in the locker room is not simply a neutral act; it is also a choice, of tribal loyalties over national ones.

Team unity is an admirable goal for a coach. But to secure that unity, he asked Villanueva, a West Pointer who served in Afghanistan, to refrain from publicly honoring a symbol of the larger team we’re all supposed to be a part of: the United States. The coach asked him to choose tribal unity over the national kind. It’s a false choice, but one that a lot of people are nonetheless being forced to make. And no matter what they choose, a lot of people end up angry.

Tomlin himself, of course, was clearly in a bad position. And I have sympathy for the players who put him there. I understand why people with a platform would want to use it to publicly express the feeling that a lot of black Americans have: that their country does not treat them as completely equal citizens, but as a caste apart.

Feeling like a citizen is more than being entitled to carry the passport abroad. If you are regularly stopped by police, demanding to know who you are and what you’re doing here, you are apt to feel like exiles in your own country. People who feel this way could view the country’s anthem as something less than a sacred expression of an inviolable national unity. Or perhaps they see it as embodying that ideal, of which our nation is falling short.

A lot of people don’t see it that way, however. Players refusing to offer a small symbolic honor to the country that has made them among the richest and most revered people in the history of humanity … well, to many ordinary fans who cannot dream of such status or wealth, it seems frankly ungrateful, and disrespectful to the legions of less exalted Americans who ultimately pay their salaries.

President Donald Trump was happy to capitalize on this also-understandable sentiment. In a series of tweets this weekend, he called for the players who won’t honor the anthem to be suspended or fired. Given what the players were protesting, such an attack inevitably has its own tribal overtones.

Trump was wrong to attack the NFL players; it is beneath the dignity of the U.S. presidency to bully individuals or groups. (Exceptions made for political figures who have volunteered for the fray.) It’s understandable that NFL players wanted to make as strong a counterattack as possible. Unfortunately, huddling in a locker room is not a very effective method of striking back at the president. If it was supposed to defuse the tension, it didn’t. Trump’s base is fired up over this conflict, their sympathies entirely with the president. And the mushy middle that such protests need to persuade are unlikely to be swayed by a refusal to honor the anthem.

To get those people on your side, you first need a common connection, a claim on their sympathy and support. Where does that claim come from? Appeals to universal moral values like justice and equality may feel more important, more virtuous, than mere patriotic symbolism. But the historical record indicates that however much people honor those virtues in theory, in practice they are unwilling to actually do much to secure justice and equality for distant strangers. No, to really move people to action you need a more primal, less abstract connection, which is to say, precisely the sort of sentiments of loyalty and solidarity that the anthem evokes.

Without them, we find ourselves where we are now: tribe against tribe, lofty ideals against gut patriotism. It’s a battle that both sides are losing, at immense cost.