RUTHFULLY YOURS

Still reeling from a series of embarrassing disclosures and meltdowns that have blackened her image, Linda Sarsour, the self-promoting anti-Semitic provocateur has found herself once again embroiled in controversy. Sarsour, who has proven to be adept and promoting herself on social media, bit off more than she could chew when she provoked the ire of CNN’s Jake Tapper.

Sarsour had expressed support for Assata Shakur, a fugitive cop killer who murdered a New Jersey state trooper in 1973. Shakur was convicted of first degree murder in 1977 but managed to escape from prison less than two years later and resurfaced in communist Cuba. She is currently on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list. Sarsour has a long, sordid history of expressing support for murderers including Rasmea Odeh, the PFLP terrorist who murdered two Israeli university students, and is slated to be deported from the United States for committing immigration fraud.

Tapper called out Sarsour on her “ugly sentiments” and asked, somewhat rhetorically, if there were “any progressives out there condemning this?” Sarsour, sensitive to the fact that a prominent journalist from the mainstream dared to criticize her, lashed out with a series of bizarre tweets. She ridiculously accused Tapper of “join[ing] the ranks of the alt-right” in an effort to “target” her. Sarsour has a habit of spewing such paranoid absurdities. Last week she claimed to be the victim of an orchestrated “Zionist media” conspiracy after irregularities were discovered in an online crowd-funding campaign she started.

Sarsour then challenged Tapper to cite examples of her ugly sentiments. Tapper proceeded to cut the rabble-rouser down to size in short order by noting Sarsour’s public wish to remove Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s vagina. Ayaan is a victim of the barbaric practice of female genital mutilation, a widespread, sadistic and life-altering ritual still practiced by many Muslims, even in the United States. Sarsour’s frantic effort to delete the infamous vagina removal tweet in an attempt to hide her odious past proved unsuccessful, and continues to hound her as she tries to rebrand her image and infiltrate into the Democratic Party.

Sarsour’s supporters in the twitterverse proved equally unsuccessful in silencing Tapper. Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza called Tapper’s tweets “intentionally inflammatory.” Tapper responded with a biting riposte; “How about being part of a gang that kills a NJ State Trooper? Is that considered inflammatory?” Score 2 for Tapper, zero for the fascist left.

With a few notable exceptions, most of the criticism leveled against Sarsour and her rabid antisemitism has emanated from the center-right. The center-left has been shamefully silent in condemning Sarsour’s abhorrent views, while the hard-left has embraced her fully.

Tapper’s criticism of Sarsour stands in marked contrast to cowardly and pernicious elements on the left who pretend to be progressives but in fact, encourage and support fascism. A good example of this is provided by liberal activist Sally Kohn who tweeted, “#IStandWithLinda today & always…I know @lsarsour to be a defender of justice FOR ALL!” She then absurdly tweeted “both sides have a problem with hateful crazies. The difference is the left denounces theirs. The right elects theirs president.”

The glaring irony strains credulity. Sarsour is on record advocating violence against Israelis and voicing support for terrorists and cop killers. She is a supporter of the anti-Semitic BDS movement, asserted that “nothing is creepier than Zionism,” alleged that supporters of Israel cannot be feminists, and has expressed a desire to remove the vaginas of women with whom she disagrees. She is a supporter of Sharia law of the brand practiced in Saudi Arabia, a country infamous for oppressing women, and which recently arrested a woman who had the temerity to wear “indecent clothing” to wit, a miniskirt. And yet Kohn and others leftists of similar ilk, while claiming to reject extremism within their ranks, still admire and stand with Sarsour.

Antisemitism is a feature ensconced within the hard-left. The hard-left’s embrace of Sarsour is hardly surprising and is in fact, to be expected. The center-left, which seeks to broaden the party’s appeal to more radical elements, is too craven to challenge Sarsour’s outrageous comments and her support for cop killers, convicted terrorists and assorted anti-Semites. But Tapper’s pointed criticism of Sarsour represents a notable crack in the façade. Whether it leads to further action by the center-left to repudiate known anti-Semites like Sarsour, and tackle rampant antisemitism within its ranks is still too early to say. I’m not holding my breath.

What difference does it make?

Bad ideas work their way back to worse premises. The ‘worse premise’ of the bad idea of NeverTrump was that it didn’t really matter if Hillary won. It was an echo of Hillary’s infamous Benghazi testimony.

What difference does it make anyway if the woman behind the Arab Spring were running our foreign policy and if the Clinton Foundation’s gallery of rogue donors were running everything else?

It sure as hell didn’t make a difference to NeverTrumpers who were too busy grading Trump on table manners and finding implausible reasons to believe that President Hillary Clinton wouldn’t be so bad. NeverNeverTrumpland became its own echo chamber with no one to call out its crazy delusions.

Trump won, Hillary lost and NeverTrumpers clings to its “What difference does it make” premise.

At the New York Post, John Podhoretz insists that, “Hillary’s White House would be no different from Trump’s.”

Bad idea meet worse premise.

“The astonishing answer, if you really think it through, is: not all that different when it comes to policy,” he claims.

Only in NeverNeverTrumpland could anyone come up with an “astonishing answer” like that.

It’s an astonishingly astonishing answer since Hillary’s platform called for ending deportations of illegal aliens and allowing them access to ObamaCare. That’s slightly different from building a wall, a 33% increase in illegal alien arrests and a 67% decline in illegal immigration under President Trump.

But a lot of NeverTrumpers seem closer to Hillary’s position there anyway.

Hillary’s platform also called for expanding ObamaCare, killing coal and fracking, automatic voter registration at 18, undermining the Second Amendment, a job-killing minimum wage hike and free college. That’s a long way from repealing ObamaCare, a coal and fracking boom, the restoration of law and order, fixing college abuses and conducting voter fraud investigations.

But what difference does it make in NeverNeverTrumpland where policy doesn’t matter anyway?

On foreign policy, the President of the United States has an even freer hand. And the free hand would have belonged to the woman who handed entire countries over to the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda and ISIS.

Podhoretz claims that a Republican congress would have blocked Hillary from getting anything done. The Obama years suggest that putting our faith in the obstructive powers of a GOP Congress ought to come with a free limited edition of the Brooklyn Bridge. And Hillary had made a point of asserting that many of her policy proposals would bypass Congress.

“Trump has gotten very little done. The same would have been true if Hillary had won,” he writes.

Hillary Clinton had promised to bypass Congress on gun control, energy restrictions and immigration. Both Trump and Clinton pledged to roll out a big batch of executive orders. Hers would have been very different than his.

If Congress won’t act, became a theme of hers during the campaign. Would she have done it?

On Thursday, the Trump administration’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) will release its semi-annual “Unified Agenda,” a master plan for all significant federal regulation which agencies intend to issue in the coming months. According to one conservative leader, this agenda will provide a blueprint for how the administration will cut down on all kinds of regulation — not just official rules, but also “regulatory dark matter.”

“If you go outside and look at the stars tonight, you’re not seeing much of the universe. The bulk of it is dark matter,” explained Clyde Wayne Crews, vice president for policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), on a call with reporters. Similarly, while Congress passes a few laws and administrative agencies issue a few official regulations, “there are thousands and thousands of other notices,” bulletins, letters, and so on, issued by agencies every year.

This “regulatory dark matter” is hard to track, because it isn’t even collected or examined. Rather, an agency will set forth specific dictates and companies, organizations, or individuals will follow them, without the intermediate step of an official law or regulation.

The best example of this came last May, when the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) sent a letter to North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory insisting that House Bill 2, the state’s law restricting public, multiple-stall restrooms on the basis of biological sex, violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by institutionalizing sex discrimination.

In one sweeping move, the DOJ had redefined the Civil Rights Act of 1964, extending its protection against discrimination on the basis of sex to transgender people, something foreign to the law itself and with which the law’s authors clearly would have disagreed.

This letter was not an official law passed by Congress and signed by the president. Nor was it an official regulation, submitted in the Federal Register. No, it was an administrative fiat which threatened hefty penalties — the revocation of North Carolina’s $4.5 billion in federal funding for the 2016-2017 school year.

But this infamous transgender mandate — reversed by a Trump administration directive this past February — is just the tip of the iceberg, Crews said.

“It’s long been the case that there are more regulations than laws, and if we’re missing regulations, we’re missing government’s biggest effect on the economy,” the CEI vice president argued. He expanded the astral metaphor adding, “Lately, Washington has gone supernova.” CONTINUE AT SITE

How much goalpost moving should be tolerable in the Trump-Russia collusion investigation?https://amgreatness.com/2017/07/19/muellers-investigation-must-limited-accountable/

Remember, we started with an allegation that the Trump campaign may have been complicit in the Putin regime’s “cyber-espionage”—i.e., the hacking our intelligence agencies have concluded that Russian government operatives carried out against email accounts tied to Democrats. The investigation took a more serious turn last week, when it was revealed that Trump campaign officials met in June 2016 with a suspected emissary of the Putin regime. Yet, there is currently no basis to believe that meeting had anything to do with hacking. So, while the meeting warrants investigation, the original allegation is no closer to being proved.

Of course, it is certainly possible for a political campaign and a foreign government to engage jointly in unsavory behavior that does not rise to the level of crime. The less objectionable the behavior, however, the further afield we would be from the egregious allegation that prompted the investigation in the first place. Unless one is a rank partisan whose goal is to damage the president (rather than hold him accountable for actual, significant wrongdoing), this should be a matter of concern. Investigations are debilitating. They erode an administration’s ability to govern.

The investigation is a moving target because of its slippery vocabulary. It has been discussed and analyzed through the prism of “collusion” and “counterintelligence.”

When we think of an “investigation,” the connotation is a criminal proceeding—crimes, penal law, grand juries, subpoenas, warrants, arrests … prosecution. In that thicket, the terms “collusion” and “counterintelligence” are outliers. The former is a vague term that blurs the legally salient lines between mere association and conspiracy—that is, the difference between innocence and guilt. The latter is an unnecessary term: a counterintelligence investigation is an information-gathering exercise designed to divine the intentions of foreign powers to the extent they bear on American interests; a criminal investigation, by contrast, is an evidence-gathering exercise designed to build a prosecutable case that a specified person has committed a suspected penal-law offense.

The Trump Tower meeting on June 9, 2016, between Trump campaign figures and suspected Russian agents illustrates our difficulty.

In the criminal law, our sights are trained on conspiracy, which makes things easy. A conspiracy is an agreement to commit a violation of law. If Smith and Jones have a meeting, it is of no concern to the police unless the meeting is for the purpose of, say, arranging a heroin shipment or robbing a bank. It is the criminal offense that is the objective of the meeting, and nothing else, that makes the meeting relevant.

To speak in terms of collusion rather than conspiracy—as the Russia investigation coverage often does—only confuses matters. Contrary to what you may have heard from sundry “strategists” and “analysts,” collusion is neither a crime nor a term that has a legally consequential meaning. The word has a pejorative feel, especially in the last seven months. But literally, all it means is “concerted activity.” That could be criminal or noncriminal, sinister or benign.