RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15108/connecticut-ridicule-censorship

Among the most fundamental First Amendment rights is to ridicule — regardless of the reason. The same is true of holding people or groups up to contempt. Were Connecticut’s absurd statute to be upheld — which it will not be — it could be applied to comedians, op-ed writers, politicians, professors and other students.

And what about “creed”? Is being a conservative or a Trump supporter a creed that cannot be ridiculed?… [T]herein lies its greatest danger: selective prosecution based on current political correctness. Precisely the kind of unpopular speech which the First Amendment was designed to protect…

Such hateful expressions [Anti-Semitic, anti-Christian and anti-conservative] are not only tolerated, they are often praised as “progressive” by some of the same students and faculty members who would censor politically incorrect hate speech. Under the First Amendment, such selective censorship is intolerable.

All who care about civil liberties, regardless of race, should now join with the racist students in opposing their criminal prosecution and demanding that the Connecticut statute be struck down as unconstitutional.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the president of the university should lead the campaign against criminalizing speech that ridicules. Now that would take courage in our age of political correctness and at a time when the hard left is demanding “free speech for me but not for thee.” But this is not an age in which courage is widely practiced, especially on university campuses, and most especially by administrators.

Two students at the University of Connecticut have been charged with the crime of ridiculing African Americans by shouting the N-word as part of a childishly inappropriate game. A video of the incident went viral and generated protests on and off the campus.

Outrageous as shouting this racist epithet is, the First Amendment protects it from criminal prosecution or other governmental sanctions. The Connecticut General Statute under which the students were charged is just about as unconstitutional as any statute can be. It is not even a close case. Here is what the statute criminalizes:

Section 53-37 – Ridicule on account of creed, religion, color, denomination, nationality or race.

Any person who, by his advertisement, ridicules or holds up to contempt any person or class of persons, on account of the creed, religion, color, denomination, nationality or race of such person or class of persons, shall be guilty of a class D misdemeanor.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/rbg-deserves-to-be-believed-11572633115

Remarks by former President Bill Clinton this week appear to contradict a 1993 sworn statement from Ruth Bader Ginsburg about their discussions prior to her confirmation as a Supreme Court Justice. History suggests readers should be skeptical of the Clinton claim.

Justice Ginsburg was present when Mr. Clinton made the comments on Wednesday evening in Washington, but may not have expected the need to address details of a decades-old conversation as alleged by Mr. Clinton.

The former President and the current Justice were on stage along with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at Georgetown Law’s second annual Ruth Bader Ginsburg lecture. The three were being interviewed by Georgetown law professors Wendy Williams and Mary Hartnett, who are the Justice’s authorized biographers.

Adam Liptak of the New York Times notes that Mr. Clinton was discussing a 1993 interview with Ms. Ginsburg which occurred while he was considering nominating her to the Court:

“I knew after about 10 minutes that I was going to give her the job,” he said.
They discussed abortion, Mr. Clinton said. Justice Ginsburg, then a federal appeals court judge, had been critical of aspects of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that established a constitutional right to abortion.
The Supreme Court had moved too fast, Justice Ginsburg wrote in 1992. It would have sufficed, she wrote, to strike down the extreme Texas law at issue in the case and then proceed in measured steps in later cases to consider other abortion restrictions.

https://pjmedia.com/video/andrew-cuomo-we-didnt-have-hurricanes-before-climate-change/

On Friday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) said that hurricanes, superstorms, and tornadoes did not occur before climate change. In the same breath, he said that anyone who questions the left’s climate-alarmist hysteria is “just delusional.” He may want to check in a mirror.

After he finished berating President Donald Trump in an interview with MSNBC, Cuomo turned to his latest attempt to enforce climate change orthodoxy.

“You know, anyone who questions extreme weather and climate change is just delusional at this point,” Cuomo said. “We have seen in the State of New York what everyone is seeing. We see these weather patterns that we never had before. We didn’t have hurricanes, we didn’t have superstorms, we didn’t have tornadoes.”

While it is at least plausible that carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels might lead to increasing global temperatures and rising sea levels, it takes a special kind of insanity to think that there were no hurricanes or tornadoes before human beings started burning carbon for energy.

Even interpreting Cuomo’s words charitably, the governor said that New York State did not experience hurricanes, superstorms, and tornadoes until the effects of manmade climate change. It is difficult to assess this claim, because written records do not go very far back, but even this less delusional suggestion is entirely incorrect.

An analysis of sedimentary evidence from New Jersey showed that a major hurricane struck the New York/New Jersey area between 1278 and 1438, long before the internal combustion engine. Another hurricane tracked parallel to the East Coast with impacts on New England and New York in August 1635. On September 8, 1667, a “severe storm” was reported in Manhattan. The Great Storm of 1693 caused severe damage on Land Island in October 1693. In September 1785, ships crashed into Governors Island as a result of powerful waves reportedly generated by a tropical cyclone. In August 1788, a hurricane struck New York City or Long Island, causing severe flooding and leaving the west side of the Battery “in ruins.”

Unless the Iroquois and their ancestors were secretly burning fossil fuels — and cleverly erased the evidence they did so — Cuomo’s statement about there having been no hurricanes and superstorms in New York prior to climate change is flat-out wrong. A simple Google search would have set him straight.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/bill-de-blasio-joker-in-new-york-city-hall/

What Bill de Blasio is doing to the residents of New York is hardly funny.

What happens when the Democratic party gets to realize all its deepest fantasies, with gushers of money to fund them, judges to rubber-stamp them, and the political opposition having melted away? Affix your gaze to the city of New York. In Joker, Arthur Fleck inquires, “Is it just me, or is it getting crazier out there?” Arthur was referring to bedlam in the streets. Today the people of Gotham are well-behaved, but it’s the Joker in City Hall who is firing nutty schemes at those of us who live here.

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s many press conferences trumpeting his hideous new plans would make more sense if they were punctuated with long, sustained episodes of harsh and deranged laughter. Consider the city’s stance toward illegal immigrants. De Blasio has for years been issuing official government ID cards to them. Lately de Blasio decided that this wasn’t enough, and he announced that he, or rather we, would be footing the bill for housing for illegal immigrants. Because de Blasio instructed New York’s public-housing system to ditch the requirement that applicants for subsidized housing present their Social Security numbers, an illegal immigrant who arrived yesterday, a legal immigrant who did everything by the book, and a native-born New Yorker all have an equal shot at one of the coveted cheap apartments, which are awarded by lottery. The New York City Housing Authority cannot even house all New Yorkers, as anyone who has ever stepped over a sleeping wino on the way to the ATM has noticed, but now it is in the business of trying to house the world.

Or even to heal it. “You will hear some critics who say we can’t afford to give everyone health care,” de Blasio said at a noteworthy press conference announcing the city would start funding health care for illegal immigrants. He added there’s “plenty of money in this world; there’s plenty of money in this country; it’s just in the wrong hands.” Cue deranged giggling. The taxpayer is also funding the undocumented when it comes time to try to deport him for, say, committing an egregious crime. Sneak into the country illegally, make your way to New York City, and you’ll be treated better than anybody except maybe the mayor’s son, whom he ordered police to drive to Yale when young Dante de Blasio was a student there.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/linking-incompatibles-is-the-lefts-stock-in-trade/

Any clear-sighted observer can see that America is now undergoing its most severe crisis of legitimacy since the Civil War of 1861-1865. The Democrat Party has gone hard left, the education system is indoctrinating the young with a socialist syllabus as extensive and invariant as the Nazi curriculum of the 1930s, the media are irremediably corrupt, the pervasive ideology of “social justice” ensures multiple miscarriages of basic justice, an activist judiciary defies constitutional legality, and violence both rhetorical and actual has become the standard operating procedure of the New Totalitarians. The nation’s public institutions and government agencies are in full sedition mode, and the lawful tenure and authority of the President is under sustained attack. As David Goldman writes, correctly, President Trump is “fighting a mutiny by the U.S. intelligence community. If the mutineers succeed, it will be the end of the republic.”

There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth, much lament and detailed analysis among conservative thinkers and writers over the current state of affairs. The problem is that pragmatic and meaningful proposals to rectify a deteriorating social, cultural and political situation are hard to come by.

Normality tends to flinch in the face of reality. It is, after all, a natural inclination to dismiss or underestimate the premonition of catastrophe until, one day, it actually happens. Volcanoes do erupt. Occasionally an asteroid will plow into the earth. A revolution will destroy a nation from one year to the next. Foresight and preparation can avoid or at least mitigate disaster. Better to bite the bullet before the bullet strikes, and to act with courage and determination to avert a looming catastrophe.

Any effort at pushback is regularly met by the tactic of the false analogy, in this case by comparing justified anti-Marxist resistance with fascist bigotry, government oppression, or anti-liberal intimidation. The tactic is highly effective since decent people—and most conservatives I know are decent people—tend to recoil from being associated with repressive regimes, ideologies of hatred, and anti-democratic attitudes. The taint of the disreputable, no matter how apocryphal, is an extremely powerful deterrent. Clarity and fortitude must prevail against the miasma of spurious imputation deployed by the left.

Of course, the left will use the false analogy not only to denigrate its opponents but to justify its chosen paladins. The monstrous fanatic and genocidal terrorist Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of ISIS and torturer and killer of thousands, becomes for The Washington Post an “austere religious scholar.” Similarly, Antifa, a violent ideologically-driven fascist cult and the most recent incarnation of Hitler’s Brownshirts, Germany’s Baader Meinhoff, and Italy’s Red Brigades, can pass itself off as anti-fascist.

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/468483-a-partisan-impeachment-vote-is-exactly-what-the-framers-feared

The House vote to establish procedures for a possible impeachment of President Trump, along party lines with two Democrats opposing and no Republicans favoring, was exactly was Alexander Hamilton feared in discussing the impeachment provisions laid out in the Constitution.

Hamilton warned of the “greatest danger” that the decision to move forward with impeachment will “be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties than the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.” He worried that the tools of impeachment would be wielded by the “most cunning or most numerous factions” and lack the “requisite neutrality toward those whose conduct would be the subject of scrutiny.”

It is almost as if this founding father were looking down at the House vote from heaven and describing what transpired this week. Impeachment is an extraordinary tool to be used only when the constitutional criteria are met. These criteria are limited and include only “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Hamilton described these as being “of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

His use of the term “political” has been widely misunderstood in history. It does not mean that the process of impeachment and removal should be political in the partisan sense. Hamilton distinctly distinguished between the nature of the constitutional crimes, denoting them as political, while insisting that the process for impeachment and removal must remain scrupulously neutral and nonpartisan among members of Congress.

Thus, no impeachment should ever move forward without bipartisan support. That is a tall order in our age of hyperpartisan politics in which party loyalty leaves little room for neutrality. Proponents of the House vote argue it is only about procedures and not about innocence or guilt, and that further investigation may well persuade some Republicans to place principle over party and to vote for impeachment, or some Democrats to vote against impeachment. While that is entirely possible, the House vote would seem to make such nonpartisan neutrality extremely unlikely.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/latest-impeachment-witness-contradicts-vindmans-claim-that-key-details-were-left-out-of-ukraine-call-transcript/

A senior White House official who listened to President Trump’s controversial phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky testified Thursday in a closed-door impeachment hearing that the White House did not omit any key details of the conversation from the publicly-released transcript.

The official, Tim Morrison, also told House lawmakers he did not think Trump discussed anything illegal on the call.

“I want to be clear, I was not concerned that anything illegal was discussed,” Morrison said in remarks to Congress.

Morrison’s testimony contradicts that of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the National Security Council’s top Ukraine expert, who testified on Tuesday that he believes the White House omitted from the transcript Trump’s claim that recordings of vice president Joe Biden existed that implicated him in corrupt dealings.

During a July 25 phone call with Zelensky, Trump asked the Ukrainian president to help the U.S. investigate allegations that Biden used his position as vice president to help Ukrainian natural-gas company Burisma Holdings avoid a corruption probe soon after his son, Hunter Biden, was appointed to its board of directors. That phone conversation has become the crux of House Democrats’ formal impeachment inquiry against Trump.