RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/al-franken-brett-kavanaugh-questions-pathetic/

1)Al, as you were posting on social media a list of proposed questions for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, did it occur to you that your opinion on the matter is no more relevant than Harvey Weinstein’s?

2) Al, is it appropriate for a disgraced former U.S. senator to use the Twitter cognomen “U.S. Senator Al Franken”? Are you aware that being a senator is simply a temporary public-service job, not a permanent title of nobility, the usage of which this country discourages?

3) Al, until the abrupt end of your political career, when your term in the U.S. Senate ended as badly as the release of your film Stuart Saves His Family, you had been a U.S. senator for eight and a half years. Yet you had been a carcinogenically unfunny comedian for more than 40 years. Would not the Twitter handle “Carcinogenically Unfunny Comedian” be more appropriate for you to use as a permanent title?

4) Al, should not a senator who disgraced his office by sexually assaulting various women adopt a public pose of contrition rather than arrogance in the months immediately following his resignation?

5) Al, when you publicly list the questions you’d like to ask Kavanaugh, do you think Minnesota’s new junior senator, Tina Smith, might have just cause to feel that you are infringing on her territory? Are you in effect mansplaining to Senator Smith how to go about questioning a Supreme Court nominee?

6) Al, in your strange resignation speech of December 7, when you said, “Some of the allegations against me are simply not true. Others I remember very differently,” were you implying that you were resigning despite having done nothing wrong?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/07/thank_the_lord_donald_trump_is_not_an_intellectual.html

I recently participated in an email chain with conservative writers and thinkers on the inexhaustible subject of Donald Trump. Some of my correspondents, while supporting Trump as a political champion, regretted his “coarseness.” He is, they alleged, rather too crude and rough hewn to comport with their ideal of proper presidential stature.

Now I can understand that if Trump behaved like Hillary, prone to hysterics, outrageous and mendacious attacks on opponents, and perpetual grievance-mongering, one might regard him as unmannerly, unstable, and preposterous, as a truly “coarse” human being with a crippling behavior problem. If he had bevies of mistresses shuttling to and from the White House while his wife was away, as did JFK, I could credit similar levels of revulsion. If he used the N-word as did LBJ or enjoyed sexually cavorting with a young intern in the Oval Office, as did Bill Clinton, disgust would be in order. When it comes to The Donald, some proportionality would seem appropriate.

Admittedly, he is no paragon of genteel bearing, but he is a man who gets things done and is true to his electoral word, a Talebian black swan among presidents.

Trump-bashing is a national pastime, which is certainly the case in my country, where few people can find anything positive to say about him. Canada’s most popular newspaper, the Toronto Star, ludicrously asserts on its main page that Trump utters one false word in every 19.4 words. The entire apparatus of the paper’s “statistical correlations” is nothing less than a system of ideological banality, probably the most embarrassing statistical adventure I have ever come across. One might apply the same ridiculous fact-checking calculation to Canada’s sock puppet prime minister, whose ratio of false to true words would then clock in at approximately one in two, or to the Star itself, for whom a true word would send its editors into paroxysms of incontinent horror.

For the most part, Trump is regarded by his detractors not only as a serial liar, but, as noted, an unreconstructed vulgarian. To cite the Ottawa Citizen, Trump is a “vulgar parrot,” an “offensive” boor with “the vocabulary of an eighth grader” who is a “threat to decorum” as well as to democracy. He has “crossed into a new frontier of vulgarity and coarseness,” we are told. Apart from the fact that one does not cross into a frontier, a phrase betokening a condition of agrammaticality, such criticasters – intellectuals, editors, journalists, talking heads – would have voted for Hillary and ushered in the very disaster they lay at Trump’s door – namely, “the erosion of institutions through greed, malfeasance, apathy, ignorance and ineptitude” – every word false with respect

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-union-scam-could-be-about-to-end-1531778546

One of the worst public-sector union scams is about to end. “Partial public employee” unions represent in-home health aides, paid by states with Medicaid money to care for disabled beneficiaries—often the aides’ own children or elderly parents.

In recent decades, PPEs have typically come into existence when Democratic governors order union-certification elections with loose rules, usually including a participation rate of only 10%. Many workers are unaware that they have become union members. They remain ignorant, as the state deducts union dues and fees before sending payments. Such payments are usually made through direct deposit and often without an itemized pay stub.

The unions have no incentive to inform the workers—who in turn have no idea they need to contact the union to opt out. Thus money keeps flowing to these unions even though the Supreme Court, in Harris v. Quinn (2014), imposed on PPE unions a ban on forced nonmember “agency fees.” This year, in Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the court extended that rule to all public-sector unions.

Janus struck a second blow by requiring affirmative consent before collecting money from public workers.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-russia-indictments-why-now-1531778599

The indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence agents last week, on charges they hacked into Democratic National Committee and other servers during the 2016 campaign, raises questions about the timing of the announcement and the work of the hackers themselves. The news came on the eve of the Trump-Putin summit. Why then?

The president was told of the indictments before he traveled. Yet the plain effect of the announcement was to raise further doubts about the wisdom of the meeting—and perhaps to shape its agenda. Neither is the business of the special counsel or anyone else at the Justice Department. The department has a longstanding policy, not directly applicable here but at least analogous, that candidates should not be charged close to an election, absent urgent need, lest the charges themselves affect the outcome. The general principle would seem to apply: Prosecutors are supposed to consider the impact of their actions on significant events outside the criminal-justice system, and to act with due diffidence.

From a law-enforcement standpoint, there was nothing urgent about these indictments. All 12 defendants are in Russia; none are likely ever to see the inside of a U.S. courtroom.

Alternative strategies were available. In 2008 Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, known to law enforcement as the “Merchant of Death” and the defendant in a sealed indictment, was lured in a sting by U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents to Thailand, where he was seized. The Thais, to their great credit, resisted heavy Russian pressure to release him. Instead they fulfilled their treaty obligations and granted a U.S. extradition request.

It has been argued that the objective of last week’s indictments was not to prosecute the defendants but to “name and shame” them. They were named, and even their military intelligence units disclosed—but shamed? In 2006 Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian defector to the U.K., was poisoned in London with polonium from a Russian nuclear facility. Litvinenko had charged that Vladimir Putin was directly responsible for bombing a Moscow apartment building in 1999, an event used as a pretext for the invasion of Chechnya. CONTINUE AT SITE