RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/strange-career-of-white-privilege/

Rich whites invent minority pedigrees to gain advantage while they condemn poor and working-class rural whites as racist.

You hear the phrase “white privilege” nonstop in America these days, as the slogan has transcended the campus and entered popular culture.

Historically, the term apparently refers to the original European settlers who came to the United States and later equated the protections of the U.S. Constitution solely with their own majority ethnicity and race — a tribal and chauvinistic mindset that still governs politics and immigration the world over, from China and Japan to most African and South American countries.

Yet the singular transcendent logic of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence was that all people innately were created equal. It took over two centuries on the ground to catch up to such lofty idealism.

Yet given that immigration by the early 19th century was already bringing in millions of so-called non-white immigrants, in addition to Native and African Americans, America soon was at least evolving into a multiracial democratic nation united under one shared culture — a radical idea and the first such edgy experiment in human history.

During the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, the nation’s racial tensions were mostly still defined as a binary of a dominant white majority and an often discriminated-against African-American minority.

Years of past prejudice had sparked the idea of affirmative action, or federal reparatory programs accorded to a historically discriminated-against black minority.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/robert-mueller-paul-manafort-collusion-evidence-wont-be-used/

But that doesn’t mean he has no such evidence.

Paul Manafort faces two criminal trials, the first of which is scheduled to commence in the Eastern District of Virginia later this month. It is routine in such cases for the parties to file “motions in limine,” which ask the court to preclude evidence on topics that are claimed to be irrelevant to the charges and that could cause unfair prejudice or confusion.

The indictment on which Manafort will be tried primarily involves allegations of tax cheating and bank fraud. There are no charges involving so-called collusion in Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, the suspected scheme that was the rationale for Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel. Manafort thus filed an in limine motion to keep the collusion issue out of the case. In responding, the special counsel agreed with the defense, representing that the prosecution “does not intend to present at trial evidence or argument concerning collusion with the Russian government.”

This has prompted some chirping from Trump supporters. They note that Manafort is accused in the Steele dossier of being the key cog in the supposed Trump–Russia “collusion” arrangement. The suggestion is that Mueller has no real collusion evidence despite the fact that the FBI has been investigating the matter for two years.

It may well be that Mueller does not have a prosecutable collusion case (indeed, we have long surmised as much). But that is not a conclusion that can sensibly be drawn from the unremarkable fact that the special counsel does not plan to prove collusion in the imminent Manafort trial. Because collusion evidence would not be germane to the fraud allegations that the jury will be asked to decide, there would be no reason to introduce such evidence, if it exists.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-champion-of-constitutional-safeguards-1531189515

Days before President Trump announced his choice of Judge Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court, Senate Democrats had vowed to oppose any nominee. Backed by an activist-fueled propaganda machine, they now will unleash relentless personal attacks—on Judge Kavanaugh’s Catholic faith, his “elitist” Yale degrees, his service in the George W. Bush administration.

As with the attacks last year on Justice Neil Gorsuch, they should be unavailing. Over Judge Kavanaugh’s 12 years on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, he has developed an impressive record as a legal thinker and a champion of the Constitution’s structural safeguards against overweening government.

Typical is a 2008 dissent in which Judge Kavanaugh concluded that the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board was unconstitutionally structured because it improperly insulated the agency from political accountability. The opinion was a tour de force of historical exposition and originalist methodology—that is, interpreting the Constitution’s text as it was originally understood. The Supreme Court ultimately agreed, adopting the reasoning of Judge Kavanaugh’s dissent.

Yet he is equally wary of unbridled executive authority, as a 2013 case shows. When the Nuclear Regulatory Commission declined to proceed with licensing the proposed waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev., which the agency appeared to oppose on policy grounds, he wrote: “The President may not decline to follow a statutory mandate or prohibition simply because of policy objections.”

In articles and speeches as well as formal opinions, Judge Kavanaugh has been a leading critic of Chevron deference, the courts’ practice of giving agencies free rein to interpret their own statutory authority. In a 2016 law-review article, he wrote that Chevron encourages the executive branch “to be extremely aggressive in seeking to squeeze its policy goals into ill-fitting statutory authorizations and restraints,” cutting Congress out of the picture. “The American rule of law, as I see it, depends on neutral, impartial judges who say what the law is.”CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12629/un-poverty-united-states

You may be aware that the UN actually has an official definition of “extreme poverty,” which is “liv[ing]… on less than $1.90 per person per day.” $1.90 per day would come to just under $700 per year.

An April 2018 study by John Early for the Cato Institute found that counting the $1.2 trillion of annual redistributions toward the income of the recipients — a sum often misleadingly excluded from poverty statistics — reduces the official poverty level in the U.S. from 12.7% all the way down to about 2%. And the remaining 2% would be people who for some reason had not sought out the benefits.

In other words, the U.S. distributes to its low-income residents resources beyond their income equal to an additional 40 times per person the amount officially deemed by the UN to constitute “extreme poverty.”

Is the United Nations a group of people of good faith, joining together in the effort to help bring peace and justice and economic development to the world? Or is it a group of haters of freedom and capitalism engaged primarily in spewing ignorance, malice or both toward the United States? For a clue, you might take a look at the “Report of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights on his mission to the United States of America,” recently issued by the UN’s so-called Human Rights Council.

Yes, this is the same Human Rights Council from which the U.S. just announced its withdrawal. It is also the same Human Rights Council that includes among its members China, Cuba, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela — with ambassadors who think that the best use of their time and resources is to criticize the economic and human rights record of the U.S.

https://amgreatness.com
Twelve days ago, Justice Anthony Kennedy stepped down and Monday night the pick to replace him was in. President Trump named D.C. Appeals Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh, 53, for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. The president sought a candidate who would “do what the law requires” and “apply the Constitution as written.”

That is also what Trump supporters are looking for, and why Democrats opposed Trump’s whole list. For Democrats, the Supreme Court is a robed politburo that gives them what they fail to win through the electoral process. Even before the announcement of Kavanaugh, who clerked for Anthony Kennedy, they were turning up the volume to eleven. The battle to confirm Kavanaugh is certain to be fierce, so all age groups, Millennials in particular, might profit from a review of the Democrats’ grand inquisitors of the past.

Ohio Democrat Senator Howard Metzenbaum, a veteran of Communist Party fronts such as the National Lawyers Guild, took the lead against black conservative Clarence Thomas in 1991. Metzenbaum thought he was intellectually superior to the Bush nominee, but Thomas, a Yale man like Kavanaugh, made him look a fool. It was likely Metzenbaum who leaked Anita Hill’s fake story, and the Democrat pushed hard on the sexual harassment allegations.

When black businessman John Doggett testified in favor of Thomas, Metzenbaum charged that Doggett was also guilty of sexual harassment. White liberal Joe Biden also attacked on that front.

“From my standpoint as a black American,” Thomas said, “as far as I’m concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.”