RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/sen-john-fetterman-to-become-first-sitting-democratic-senator-to-visit-trump-at-mar-a-lago/ar-BB1rbwVn?ocid=winp2fptaskbar&cvid=7148764e0eff4e62f664f37163b33dd4&ei=27

Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman said Thursday that he has accepted an invitation from President-elect Donald Trump to meet with him at Mar-a-Lago, which will make him the first sitting Democratic Senator known to have visited him at his Florida home since the election.

“President Trump invited me to meet, and I accepted. I’m the Senator for all Pennsylvanians — not just Democrats in Pennsylvania,” Fetterman said in a statement. CBS News first reported that Fetterman accepted Trump’s invitation to meet.

“That is the plan. Yes, we are going to have a conversation,” Fetterman told CBS News. “I think that one, he’s the president, or he will be officially.”

“And I think it’s pretty reasonable that if the president would like to have a conversation — or invite someone to have a conversation — to have it. And no one is my gatekeeper,” he added.

Fetterman has continued to break with his party over his support of many of Trump’s cabinet picks. He has also been very vocal on allegations of antisemitism in the Democratic party and has been a vocal supporter of Israel. Now, he will be the first sitting Democrat in the Senate to visit Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/10/the-new-orleans-terrorist-attack-and-the-self-radicalization-canard/

Despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, the FBI and the mainstream media quickly declared that New Orleans terrorist Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a Muslim American born in Texas, was “self-radicalized,” “inspired” by ISIS and acted alone.

This is an all-too-common response to acts of radical Islamist terrorism in the U.S. The FBI and the press almost always rule out the possibility that other persons or groups were involved. They also frequently claim that the motives of suspected terrorists who are killed may never be known, even though there may be clear signs that they were motivated by radical Islamist ideology.

The reason for these denials is a misguided belief that it is racist and politically incorrect ever to assess that foreign Islamist terrorist groups or American Muslim clerics and groups bear any responsibility for Islamist terrorist attacks in the United States.

Despite such denials concerning the New Year’s terrorist attack by Shamsud-Din Jabbar, there are compelling reasons to believe they played a role in radicalizing Jabbar and that foreign terrorist operatives facilitated his terrorist attack.

First, it is significant that Jabbar traveled to Cairo, Egypt for 11 days in mid-2023. Since Jabbar was in debt and almost broke, it is unlikely he took such a long, expensive, and exotic trip as a tourist. It is more likely that he visited Cairo to meet members of radical Islamist terrorist groups.  Cairo is the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist organization and the progenitor of al Qaeda and ISIS.

Is it possible that Jabbar received terrorist training during his 11-day trip to Cairo? Terrorism expert Dr. Walid Phares thinks so, writing in a January 6 tweet:

There is another reason to strongly suspect the involvement of a foreign party—possibly a foreign Islamist terrorist organization—in the New Orleans terrorist attack. Jabbar reportedly carried two bombs in his truck that used a very rare explosive compound called R-salt, a derivative of the explosive RDX. This explosive reportedly has never before been used in terrorist bombings in the U.S. or Europe. R-salt is a powerful and difficult-to-detect explosive. However, homemade bombmakers don’t use explosives like R-salt because they require detonators, which are hard for them to obtain. Jabbar used a makeshift detonator in his R-salt bombs, which did not detonate.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/house-passes-bill-to-sanction-icc-over-arrest-warrants-for-netanyahu-gallant/

The House passed a bipartisan bill to sanction the International Criminal Court on Thursday after the body issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant in November.

The bill passed the House by a vote of 243–140, with 45 Democrats in support. Many lawmakers were absent for the vote, which coincided with former president Jimmy Carter’s state funeral in Washington, D.C.

Thursday’s vote marks the second time that the House has passed the measure, which went nowhere last year in the Democrat-dominated Senate. Republican lawmakers revived the bill now that they control both chambers of Congress.

The ICC accused Netanyahu and Gallant, as well as Hamas commander Mohammed Deif, of war crimes during Israel’s ongoing conflict in Gaza, which was sparked by the Palestinian terrorist group’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. The Jewish state claimed responsibility for the death of Deif, one of the reported masterminds behind the terror attack.

The warrants prevent Netanyahu and Gallant from traveling to 125 countries that are party to the ICC. The pair would be arrested if they were to step foot in any of those jurisdictions.

Congressional Republicans and moderate Democrats, who ally themselves with Israel, sharply criticized the ICC for seeking the arrests of the Israeli leaders. As such, they backed legislation to punish the court.

“A kangaroo court is seeking to arrest the prime minister of our great ally, Israel, which is not only responding to an enemy which conducted a genocide, but an enemy who still holds 100 hostages,” Representative Brian Mast (R., Fla.), who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said on the House floor ahead of the vote.

https://tomklingenstein.com/making-sense-of-trumps-mandate/

Anti-Trump conservatives struggle to interpret our current political moment. Some are the unfortunate victims of extreme cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome which, at this point, have permanently impaired their ability to perform political analysis. But there are others, still worth reading from time to time, who remain surprisingly blinkered by the stubborn march of history. These unfortunate conservatives seem unable or unwilling to acknowledge that the long twentieth century has come to an end. A new political analysis is needed for a moment altogether new.

Consider one scholar from whom I have learned much: Yuval Levin, who has in the past employed his background in political philosophy to explore the deep sources and undercurrents of contemporary politics. In 2014, he treated Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke as the distant founders of contemporary progressivism and conservatism, respectively. In 2016, he channeled Alexis de Tocqueville to diagnose the “fracturing of the American republic.” During the Age of Trump, he has written on the importance of renewing the fundamental institutions of American society and, most recently, on the prospects for a recovered constitutionalism to restore unity to the American polity despite our inevitable political disagreements.

For all his erudition, Levin seems unable to grasp the significance of the 2024 election. In a post-election essay for the Dispatch, he emphasizes “the continuity of our peculiar political era,” characterizing Trump’s victory as “a relatively narrow win owed almost entirely to negative polarization.” Levin dismisses the possibility that “Trump’s eccentric mix of interests and priorities” is “well aligned with the public’s hopes and fears.” In fact, he charges, “Most of what Trump himself is most eager to do, from mass deportations to steep tariffs, would likely prove fairly unpopular when actually put into practice.” 

Levin also expresses a contemptuous lack of curiosity about “the motley crew surrounding Trump, whose political instincts add up to an especially incoherent jumble.” He specifically disparages Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for his alleged fixation on “tak[ing] fluoride out of our drinking water.” Levin concludes by insisting on the continued relevance of his own brand of conservatism: Trump’s “victory does not mean that Trumpian populism alone will now own the right for good.”

https://www.thefp.com/p/paradise-lost-karen-bass-los-angeles-fires?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The burning of L.A. is not just a natural disaster. It’s a man-made catastrophe.

The first job of the government is to keep people safe. Failing that, its job is to show that someone is in charge when crisis erupts. On 9/11, there was nothing then–Mayor Rudy Giuliani could do to keep the World Trade Center from falling. Yet he became, in that long-ago era, the most popular person in America by staying on the scene and leading at his city’s moment of greatest danger.

That brings us to the fires in Los Angeles—the most devastating in the history of the city, with a reported 27,000 acres burned and the fires mostly uncontained. There, authorities have failed not only at protecting its residents but at inspiring confidence that they had the situation in hand.

We start with Mayor Karen Bass. As the Palisades fire began to consume wide swaths of America’s second-largest city, she was in Ghana to watch the inauguration of that country’s new president.

Bass left Los Angeles on Saturday—two days after the National Weather Service warned that strong winds and “extreme fire weather conditions” would soon threaten the city. On Sunday, the NWS announced a fire weather watch. By Monday, the warnings had become much more urgent, with the NWS tweeting in all-caps that “A LIFE-THREATENING, DESTRUCTIVE, Widespread Windstorm” would hit L.A. imminently.

Yet Bass remained halfway around the world, effectively leaving the crisis to her deputies. They, in turn, insisted Bass could run the city from anywhere via phone and tablet.