Displaying the most recent of 92136 posts written by

Ruth King

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Trump Lifts Sanctions On Turkey, Announces Permanent Cease-Fire In Syria Posted By Tim Hains

By on October 23rd, 2019

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/10/23/watch_live_president_trump_gives_statement_on_syria.html

President Donald Trump declared a “big success” in Syria and announced he is lifting all sanctions against Turkey during a statement from the White House on Wednesday.

“Let someone else fight over this long blood-stained sand,” the president said. “We were supposed to be there for 30 days. That was almost 10 years ago. So we’re there for 30 days, and now we’re leaving. It’s supposed to be a very quick hit, and let’s get out and it was a quick hit except they stayed for almost 10 years.”

Continue reading →
ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

1998 Remarks From Biden Surface After He Attacks Trump’s ‘Lynching’ Remarks Ryan Saavedra

By on October 23rd, 2019

https://www.dailywire.com/news/1998-remarks-from-biden-surface-after-he-attacks-trumps-lynching-remarks?utm_source=cnemail&utm_medium=email&utm_content=102319-news&utm_campaign=position3

Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden was quick to attack President Donald Trump on Tuesday after Trump referred to impeachment as a “lynching,” which is the same term that Biden used in 1998 to describe the impeachment of then-President Bill Clinton.

“So some day, if a Democrat becomes President and the Republicans win the House, even by a tiny margin, they can impeach the President, without due process or fairness or any legal rights,” Trump tweeted. “All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here – a lynching. But we will WIN!”

Biden responded: “Impeachment is not ‘lynching,’ it is part of our Constitution. Our country has a dark, shameful history with lynching, and to even think about making this comparison is abhorrent. It’s despicable.”

In an appearance on CNN in October 1998, however, Biden referred to the Clinton impeachment as a “partisan lynching,” saying:

Even if the President should be impeached, history is going to question whether or not this was just a partisan lynching or whether or not it was something that in fact met the standard, the very high bar, that was set by the founders as to what constituted an impeachable offense.

Continue reading →
MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

COLLEGE BEHIND BARS to Air on PBS in November 2019

By on October 23rd, 2019

https://www.pbs.org/about/blogs/news/college-behind-bars-to-air-on-pbs-in-november-2019/

New Four-Part Documentary Series by Lynn Novick Follows Prisoners Through Rigorous College Program; Explores How Education Transforms Lives and Impacts Criminal Justice

Alfred I. duPont-Columbia and Peabody-Award winning filmmaker Lynn Novick(THE VIETNAM WAR, PROHIBITION, FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT,THE WAR) has directed and produced a new documentary series, COLLEGE BEHIND BARS, that reveals the transformative power of higher education through the experiences of incarcerated men and women, PBS announced today during the Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour. The four-hour series directed and produced by Novick and produced by longtime collaborator Sarah Botstein (THE VIETNAM WAR, PROHIBITION, THE WAR, JAZZ), will air on PBS in November 2019.

COLLEGE BEHIND BARS marks a new path for Novick, who is best known for history films directed with Ken Burns. The four-hour series, distilled from nearly 400 hours of cinéma-vérité footage, explores the lives of a dozen incarcerated men and women as they struggle to earn degrees in the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), one of the most rigorous and effective prison education programs in the country.

Continue reading →
ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

GREAT ADVICE FOR CELL PHONE ADDICTS

By on October 23rd, 2019

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/22/opinion/technology-shut-off.html?rref=collecti
24 Hours Without My Phone I recommend a tech shabbat. By David Leonhardt

In 2008, Tiffany Shlain’s father, Leonard, was diagnosed with brain cancer, and she began to change her use of technology when the two of them were together. “Some days he would have only one good hour,” she later wrote in the Harvard Business Review, “and I didn’t want to be distracted when I was with him, so I’d turn off my cellphone.”

Eventually, Shlain, a filmmaker, extended the idea into a full day without screen use. She called it a tech shabbat — after the Jewish day of rest — and she has written several articles and a recent book, called “24/6,” about the idea.

“The digital revolution has blurred the lines between time on and time off, and time off is disappearing,” she wrote in The Boston Globe. “As for our leisure time, we’ve created a culture in which we’re still ‘working’ while we play: needing to photograph every moment, then crafting witty posts of our ‘fun, relaxing activities’ on Instagram, then obsessively checking responses. We can barely catch our breath in the tsunami of personal and work digital input, which results in us not being truly present for any of it.”

This weekend, I gave Shlain’s idea a try — and I highly recommend it. My family and I turned off our cellphones and laptops on Friday night and didn’t turn them back on until Sunday morning. We made an exception for television: The baseball playoffs are going on, and watching a game as a family feels different from staring at an individual phone screen.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Serious Contender For Stupidest Litigation In The Country Goes To Trial Francis Menton

By on October 23rd, 2019

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-10-22-a-serious-contender-for-stup

From time to time here at this blog I have considered candidates for the title of “Stupidest Litigation in the Country.” For example, in this post in December 2017 I considered the candidacy of the litigation titled Kelsey Cascadia Rose Juliana v. United States, et al., brought in Oregon by a group of minor children claiming a “constitutional right” to a “stable climate,” and seeking a nationwide injunction forcing the phase-out of all use of fossil fuels in the United States. (That case is currently awaiting a decision from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.) Shortly thereafter, in January 2018, I evaluated the candidacy of various litigations around the country, including some in California and one in New York, brought by municipalities seeking to hold a collection of major oil companies responsible for a variety of future environmental calamities supposedly to be caused by “climate change.” (Many, but far from all of those cases have since been dismissed; others remain pending.)

Today I have a new candidate for the coveted title. I actually spent most of the afternoon today attending the opening statements in the trial of this case, so I can assure you that there is some serious stupidity going on here. The title of the case is People of the State of New York v. ExxonMobil Corp., currently pending in the New York State Supreme Court, New York County. (This is state rather than federal court. For those with access to the court electronic records system, the index number is 452044/2018.) Yes, it is another of the now many, many cases somehow accusing Exxon of destroying the world by causing climate change. But what is the case about, and what is the New York AG trying to accomplish? Excellent question.

Continue reading →
CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

– JESSE SMOLLET, ADAM SCHIFF, SEDITIOUS CONSPIRACY LAWS

By on October 23rd, 2019

https://www.westernjournal.com/judge-denies-jussie-smolletts-request-throw-lawsuit-will-going-forward/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=conservativebyte&utm_campaign=dailypm&utm_content=libertyalliance

Judge Denies Jussie Smollett’s Request To Throw Out Lawsuit: ‘This Will Be Going Forward’

Actor Jussie Smollett lost a round in court Tuesday as part of his effort to avoid having to pay the city of Chicago for the costs of an investigation into his allegations that he was the victim of a crime.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/10/22/john-ratcliffe-adam-schiffs-media-leaks-to-frame-impeachment-narrative-are-false/

John Ratcliffe: Adam Schiff’s “Media Leaks to Frame Impeachment Narrative Are False”……

Representative John Ratcliffe appears with Martha MacCallum to discuss the ongoing closed-door testimony from officials upset about President Trump’s unorthodox approach to foreign policy.

www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/10/laws_against_seditious_conspiracy_have_real_legal_teeth.html

Laws against seditious conspiracy have real legal teeth

Ed Timperlake

News flash for all Deep State conspirators: we have a lawfully elected President who is at the top of the Executive Branch of US Government.  As such, President Trump represents one third of our constitutionally empowered leadership and is “the US Government.”

That reality has proven to be an issue for a lot of Deep State players inside the US Government, who from day one of his election or even earlier could not accept the will of their fellow citizens. Sadly, rather than focusing on changing administrations in our four-year cycle of peaceful revolution at the ballot box, many have engaged in violating the law through a conspiracy to remove President Trump. They have been using all their power for ill as US Government employees at the Department of Justice and FBI, and aided and abetted by senior members of the Intelligence Community and State and Defense.

Continue reading →
CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

Judicial Watch: New Benghazi Documents Confirm Clinton Email Cover-Up

By on October 23rd, 2019

https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-releases/judicial-watch-new-benghazi-documents-confirm-clinton-email-cover-up/

Judicial Watch today released new Clinton emails on the Benghazi controversy that had been covered up for years and would have exposed Hillary Clinton’s email account if they had been released when the State Department first uncovered them in 2014. The long withheld email, clearly responsive to Judicial Watch’s lawsuit seeking records concerning “talking points or updates on the Benghazi attack,” contains Clinton’s private email address and a conversation about the YouTube video that sparked the Benghazi talking points scandal (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:14-cv-01242)). This Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit led directly to the disclosure of the Clinton email system in 2015.

The Clinton email cover-up led to court-ordered discovery into three specific areas: whether Secretary Clinton’s use of a private email server was intended to stymie FOIA; whether the State Department’s intent to settle this case in late 2014 and early 2015 amounted to bad faith; and whether the State Department has adequately searched for records responsive to Judicial Watch’s request. The court also authorized discovery into whether the Benghazi controversy motivated the cover-up of Clinton’s email.  (The court ruled that the Clinton email system was “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.”)

Continue reading →
MEDIA Comments turned off

Politico Shills for the Deep State with Brennan Puff Piece Debra Heine

By on October 23rd, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/22/politico-shills-for-the-deep-state-with-brennan-puff-piece/

President Trump is “obsessed” with former CIA chief John Brennan and is seeking “vengeance,” according to a stirring new report in Politico.

Because of this, reporters Natasha Bertrand (aka Fusion Natasha) and Daniel Kippman say the president is on “a collision course” with the Justice Department’s ongoing probe of the intelligence community’s “actions” in 2016.

AG Barr and John Durham, the federal prosecutor he appointed to conduct the investigation, have recently made some overseas trips to meet with officials in countries that helped the Obama administration spy on the Trump campaign—and this fact is making many current and former intelligence officials very nervous, it appears.

They should be. US attorney John Durham, who recently expanded his investigation, is in the process of requesting interviews from both Brennan and former DNI James Clapper, according to multiple reports.

Barr has said little in public about the investigation, but it reportedly centers on FBI and CIA activities before and during the Trump-Russia collusion investigation. Durham is also reportedly looking into what involvement foreign governments might have had in intelligence-gathering against Trump associates.

But according to Bertrand and Kippman, Barr and Durham are just investigating a “conspiracy theory for which there is little if any evidence.”

The “conspiracy theory” being investigated is the wacky idea that “a key player in the Russia probe, a professor named Joseph Mifsud, was actually a Western intelligence asset sent to discredit the Trump campaign — and that the CIA, under Brennan, was somehow involved.”

Who would ever think such a thing?

Rather than retreating into a life of quiet retirement after Trump was elected, John Brennan quickly became a leader of “the Resistance,” firing off scores of scathing, name-calling tweets hammering the president. He also became a commentator for NBC News and MSNBC where he routinely accused Trump of being a “Russian asset” and a multitude of other sins “without evidence.”

Continue reading →
EDUCATION Comments turned off

Universities Breed Anger, Ignorance, and Ingratitude By Victor Davis Hanson *****

By on October 23rd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/universities-breed-anger-ignorance-ingratitude/

In turning out woke and broke graduates, they have a lot to answer for.

What do widely diverse crises such as declining demography, increasing indebtedness, Generation Z’s indifference to religion and patriotism, static rates of home ownership, and a national epidemic of ignorance about American history and traditions all have in common?

In a word, 21st-century higher education.

A pernicious cycle begins even before a student enrolls. A typical college-admission application is loaded with questions to the high-school applicant about gender, equality, and bias rather than about math, language, or science achievements. How have you suffered rather than what you know and wish to learn seems more important for admission. The therapeutic mindset preps the student to consider himself a victim of cosmic forces, past and present, despite belonging to the richest, most leisured, and most technologically advanced generation in history. Without a shred of gratitude, the young student learns to blame his ancestors for what he is told is wrong in his life, without noticing how the dead made sure that almost everything around him would be an improvement over 2,500 years of Western history.

Once admitted, students take classes from faculty who, polls reveal, are roughly 90 percent liberal. According to one recent survey, Democrat professors on average outnumber Republican faculty by a 12-to-1 ratio on the nation’s supposedly diverse campuses. But such political asymmetries are magnified by a certain progressive messianic self-righteousness that turns the lectern into the pulpit, the captive class into a congregation. The rare conservative professor is more resigned to the tragedy of the universe and, in live-and-let-live fashion, vacates the campus arena to the left-wing gladiators who wish to slay any perceived heterodoxy.

Continue reading →
EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Reinstate Racial Preferences? Washington State Voters Will Decide. By Heather Mac Donald

By on October 23rd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/racial-preferences-government-washington-state-voters-will-decide/

The state’s voters outlawed such preferences in 1998; legislators tried to bring them back last April. A new ballot initiative lets the people choose.

Voting in Washington has begun on a ballot initiative to overturn that state’s ban on racial preferences in government. Voters outlawed racial preferences in 1998, as part of a mini-wave of eight such state initiatives, led by California anti-preference crusader Ward Connerly in the 1990s. The momentum behind that push for color-blindness in government has long since petered out, as identity politics became ascendant. The advocates of race-neutral government hiring, contracting, and college admissions are now on the defensive, fighting relentless efforts to undo their work.

In April 2019, the Washington state legislature hurriedly passed Initiative 1000 to bring preferences back into government policy. Now voters are facing a confusing choice. Though the referendum currently before them, Referendum 88, was instigated by racial-preference opponents, overwhelmingly Asian, to overturn Initiative 1000, a yes on the referendum would confirm passage of Initiative 1000 and reinstate preferences, and a no vote would preserve the pre-Initiative 1000 color-blind status quo.

Initiative 1000 has adopted the specious rhetoric of “holistic” college admissions, rhetoric that the Supreme Court, to its discredit as a supposedly rational jurisprudential body, has embraced. Race cannot be the “sole qualifying factor” in awarding or denying a public benefit, according to the initiative. This requirement allegedly prevents racial preferences from turning into quotas. These are the same claims made on behalf of “holistic admissions,” a supposedly real and definable practice that is meant to keep racial admissions preferences constitutional by avoiding a quota system. We are supposed to believe that admissions offices in a “holistic” regime make highly individualized decisions about applicants that award only the slightest “tip” to candidates on the basis of race. We are supposed to believe that the admissions office has NO idea what number of minorities it is shooting for, even though the racial percentages of any class remain stable from year to year, as was shown in the ongoing litigation over Harvard’s racial preferences.

Continue reading →