RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-obama-and-the-jobs-report-1528137323

The outrage over President Trump’s Friday jobs tweet may be fake, but there’s a real issue here over the way our government should communicate.

Here’s the story: On Friday, more than an hour before the release of the Department of Labor’s monthly jobs report, the President tweeted, “Looking forward to seeing the employment numbers at 8:30 this morning.”

The report turned out to include plenty of good news—more job creation than expected and an encouraging increase in wages, particularly for those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. But the President’s vague early tweet sparked an intense reaction from former aides to his predecessor and from many members of the press corps.

“Trump Touts Jobs Report Before Official Release, Breaking Protocol,” announced a New York Times headline on Friday. It was just one of many reports focusing on the President’s early tweet.

President Trump “has proven he cannot be trusted with the information,” proclaimed former Obama White House aide Aaron Sojourner.

Jason Furman, who served as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during President Obama’s second term, addresses the issue with an op-ed in the Journal:

If—69 minutes before the numbers were set to be released—President Obama had signaled via Twitter that they were going to be great, I’d have been shocked.

A president who signals advance news about economic data invites concern that he also is bragging about the good news privately, which could result in the information’s exploitation for enormous private gain by some well-connected investor.

The handling of such data certainly requires great care. But it’s not clear just how shocking such an event would have been during Mr. Obama’s second term. Mr. Furman has raised—without evidence—the possibility that Mr. Trump might privately share non-public jobs data. What about Mr. Obama?

The Journal reported on Friday:

While disclosures of economic data are rare, they aren’t unprecedented. In February 2009, with the U.S. economy in crisis and Congress debating a stimulus package, then-Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) heard from Mr. Obama around midnight that the following morning’s jobs report numbers “would be somewhat scary,” he told the Senate after the report’s release. The Labor Department reported a loss of 598,000 jobs in January. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-04/u-s-supreme-court-throws-out-gay-bias-finding-against-baker-ji0cf2pg

The U.S. Supreme Court left unresolved questions about the competing rights of business owners and gay customers as the justices issued a narrow ruling Monday favoring a Colorado baker who wouldn’t make a cake to celebrate a same-sex wedding.

Voting 7-2, the court tossed out a Colorado Civil Rights Commission finding that the baker had violated a state civil-rights law. The high court said the decision was tainted by anti-religious bias, pointing to one commissioner’s comments that religion had been used to justify slavery and the Holocaust.

“The commission’s hostility was inconsistent with the First Amendment’s guarantee that our laws be applied in a manner that is neutral toward religion,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court.

But Kennedy also said the court wasn’t deciding whether other business owners have a right to refuse to take part in gay weddings, saying those issues “must await further elaboration in the courts.”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/breaking-supreme-court-rules-in-favor-of-colorado-baker-in-gay-wedding-cake-case/

On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in favor of Colorado baker Jack Phillips, who was sanctioned for refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding.

Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, was told by a Colorado Civil Rights Commission that he cannot refuse to bake cakes for events that violate his conscience, even though he had a long history of selling items in his cakeshop to anyone who walked through the door. Phillips, citing his Christian faith, said his conscience would not allow him to design cakes for events like divorce parties, lewd bachelor parties, or same-sex weddings.

Colorado ordered him to either make cakes for same-sex weddings or stop making cakes at all.

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that “The laws and the Constitution can, and in some instances must, protect gay persons and gay couples in the exercise of their civil rights, but religious and philosophical objections to gay marriage are protected views and in some instances protected forms of expression.” Citing Obergefell v. Hodges, the justices wrote that the Commission’s treatment of Phillips’ case:

…showed elements of a clear and impermissible hostility toward the sincere religious beliefs motivating his objection. As the record shows, some of the commissioners at the Commission’s formal, public hearings endorsed the view that religious beliefs cannot legitimately be carried into the public sphere or commercial domain, disparaged Phillips’ faith as despicable and characterized it as merely rhetorical, and compared his invocation of his sincerely held religious beliefs to defenses of slavery and the Holocaust. No commissioners objected to the comments. Nor were they mentioned in the later state-court ruling or disavowed in the briefs filed here. The comments thus cast doubt on the fairness and impartiality of the Commission’s adjudication of Phillips’ case.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/desperate-times-call-for-desperate-measures-part-2/

Desperate solutions to genuinely severe public crises and the breakdown of civil order are not unheard of. We in Canada, for example, experienced martial law during the October Crisis of 1970 when the War Measures Act was invoked to deal with the threat of domestic terrorism in Quebec. The FLQ (the Front de libération du Québec), spurred by the political evangelism of a partisan press, resorted to violence to further the cause of Quebec separatism. Many have claimed that Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau overreacted; his assessment of the risk is still being bruited. But he did not hesitate to respond in decisive fashion, calling out the troops and suspending the writ of habeas corpus when he believed the future of the Confederation was at stake.

America in 2018 is in far graver peril than was Canada in 1970. “Fixing our nation seems like an impossible task,” writes Gary Demar, Senior Fellow at The American Vision, “when the media, the government, the courts, Hollywood, and the schools have been captured by Leftist elites.” In his book Whoever Controls the Schools Rules the World, DeMar argues for parental pushback against the ideological force of government-controlled education as a solution to the problem. Unfortunately, parental revolt, while a good start, is too unorganized and dispersed to be ultimately effective. Something far more comprehensive, potent and systematic is needed to halt the revolutionary momentum of the Left.

This is where, if warranted, the Canadian precedent may come into play. If nothing else works, it follows that a given political instrument that may have a chance of success in combating an insurrectionary movement and in quashing the political and cultural dragonnade threatening the Republic is precisely what no one wants to contemplate: martial law. Dinesh D’Souza concludes his must-read America: Imagine a World without Her treating a possible progressivist triumph with the following words: “[W]e will be living in a totalitarian society … America will truly be an evil empire, and it will be the right and duty of American citizens to organize once again, as in 1776, to overthrow it.”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/desperate-times-call-for-desperate-measures-part-1/

As many observers have noted, America is now embroiled in a de facto civil war in which the nation is being relentlessly attacked and disassembled from within, not by the conservative Right, as The New Yorker and other progressivist outlets irresponsibly lament, but by the domestic Left.

Reputable commentators like Kevin Williamson at National Review and John Podhoretz for the New York Post believe the nation is descending into chaos — and place the onus squarely on the Left. In a prescient article for PJ Media about the potential result of a political coup orchestrated by the Left under the guise of the faux Mueller investigation, Roger Simon writes: “That word sounds hyperbolic but it isn’t. We could see anything from civil war to social atrophy. Who knows if our country will survive it?” (As one commenter worries, “we are in some very real danger the next time a Democrat gets elected to the highest office” — no paranoiac hypothesis.)

It is a state of affairs that, in its insidious way, is no less critical than the bloody civil war that split the nation in the 1860s. There’s no blood in the streets yet — or maybe just a little — but the nation is split pretty much in half. One half wishes to destroy the other through a series of destabilizing tactics: electoral fraud, fake news, negonomics, industrial dereliction, globalist doctrine, climate change scam, university indoctrination, Blue State model primary and secondary education, the divisive concept of a “living constitution,” trade deficits, pro-Islamic logrolling, radical feminism, gender dysphoria, pro-choice abortion favoring a sub-replacement fertility rate, runaway entitlements, censorship-prone social media monopolies like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google, the abolition of the Second Amendment, open borders, caravan immigration, sanctuary cities, politically correct — and in some places, compelled — speech, judicial overreach, ubiquitous surveillance of American citizens, foreign policy surrender and revolutionary advocacy.