RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/trending/cohen-lawyer-lanny-davis-admits-he-was-peddling-bogus-info-about-russia-collusion/

Michael Cohen’s attorney/spokeman Lanny Davis furiously backpedaled this weekend after making some stunning, potential bombshell claims during his media blitz last week.

Davis suggested last week that his client had flipped, and was ready to share damaging info about President Trump that would be “of interest” to Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the Russia collusion investigation.

Davis, Bill and Hillary Clinton’s longtime consigliere, told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Tuesday that Cohen had “knowledge about the computer crime of hacking and whether or not Mr. Trump knew ahead of time about that crime and even cheered it on.”

On Wednesday, Davis told PBS’s NewsHour, “I believe that Mr. Cohen has direct knowledge that would be of interest to Mr. Mueller that suggests — I’m not sure it proves — that Mr. Trump was aware of Russian government agents hacking illegally, committing computer crimes, to the detriment of the candidate who he was running against, Hillary Clinton.”

The Goliath narrative in 1 Samuel 17 opens with the Philistine army gathered for war against Israel.

“Saul and the Israelites are facing the Philistines in the Valley of Elah. Twice a day for 40 days, morning and evening, Goliath, the champion of the Philistines, comes out between the lines and challenges the Israelites to send out a champion of their own to decide the outcome in single combat, but Saul is afraid. David, bringing food for his elder brothers, hears that Goliath has defied the armies of God and of the reward from Saul to the one who defeats him, and accepts the challenge. Saul reluctantly agrees and offers his armor, which David declines, taking only his staff, sling and five stones from a brook.”

David and Goliath, perhaps the greatest underdog story ever told, is the biblical saga of the young Israelite shepherd David challenging the giant Philistine Goliath. Tales of this long shot contest have thrilled audiences since biblical times because it features the arrogance of the unbeatable, armored “sure thing” against the boldness of the challenger armed only with a sling shot.

David is not intimidated when the towering, smug giant criticizes, taunts, insults, threatens, and laughs at him. So it is in politics!

Today the deep state giant Goliath has waged war against America and the only American with the courage to stand against this behemoth to preserve and protect the nation is unlikely combatant President Donald J. Trump.

Since announcing himself as a presidential candidate on June 15, 2016, President Trump has been the target of the well-defended, smug, seemingly indestructible deep state Goliath. The deep state and the colluding mainstream media have maligned him, criticized him, insulted him, threatened him, laughed at him, lied about him, lied to him, and now are desperately relying on philistine swamp-denizen Robert Mueller to provide a damning report – just before the midterm elections – that will finally succeed in destroying him.

https://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/how-anti-trump-hyperbole-fosters-insanit

One the strangest features of our political life in the United States today is the reckless abandon of our rhetoric. “Oh, that’s because Donald Trump has debased political discourse,” you say. “He calls women ‘dogs,’ he refers to Kim Jong-un as ‘Rocket Man,’ he says the press is ‘fake news’ and the ‘enemy of the people,’” etc., etc.

But that’s not the whole story, is it? Some diligent scribe should do a little historical digging and tabulate where, in each case of rhetorical Trumpery, the insults and opprobrium started. Did Donald Trump start the abuse? Or did his targets open hostilities?

In many, maybe most (maybe all) cases I suspect you will find that Trump’s invectives were rejoinders, i.e., responses to earlier provocations and expressions of contempt. Trump made fun of “low-energy Jeb,” but wasn’t that after Jeb said some pretty disagreeable things about Trump?

In any event, however the matter of precedent shakes out, there is also the issue of extreme rhetoric feeding extreme feelings and extreme actions. Simply put, the anti-Trump chorus has worked itself into a frenzy of trembling rage and hysterical overstatement. Trump is Hitler (literally); his behavior is “treasonous” (or, as The New York Times put it, he is a “treasonous traitor”); he is a “fascist,” a “moron,” a “tyrant” who (as tyrants tend to do) is taking the United States down “the path to tyranny.” Et very much cetera.

Now in one sense this is just business as usual when a Republican is in office. Every GOP president

He was a graduate of the United States Naval Academy ….For this old soldier it is “ Anchors Away” “On seven seas we learn Navy’s stern call: Faith, courage, service true,
With honor, over honor, over all”.…..rsk

It was composed in 1906 by Charles A. Zimmermann with lyrics by Alfred Hart Miles. When he composed “Anchors Aweigh,” Zimmermann was a lieutenant and had been bandmaster of the United States Naval Academy Band since 1887.

I grew up to senior level on standard laboratory tests, vaccinations, CAT scans, anti-biotics, the dazzling triumphs over heart disease that prolonged the life of millions, the absolutely infallible curative power of chicken soup, and the ministrations of my father and my late husband who were both internists.

This August I developed an acute and then progressive allergic reaction…details are boring…I feel well and remain under the treatment and guidance of wonderful doctors in varied specialties. What really dazzled me are the new frontiers of medical research today that neither my husband or father knew anything about. My granddaughter is in medical school and, fortuitously, quite aware of this new and growing research, namely, immunology, immune suppression, genetic predispositions, diagnosis to control and cure, and computational medicine with mathematical modeling of complex medical systems.

Look around you folks, many oldsters you see will be nonagenarians with active lives due to magnificent American Medicine. Don’t let “reformers” sell you on Socialized Medicine. Hold your legislators’ feet to the fire. 

However, chicken soup still works wonders on mind and body. rsk

Australia’s conservative lawmakers chose one of their own to become the country’s newest prime minister on Friday, after a vote that capped days of chaos in the capital and underscored the turbulence of the country’s politics.

Scott Morrison, who had been the country’s treasurer, was sworn in as the sixth prime minister in 11 years after a vote by the governing Liberal Party, in which he defeated Peter Dutton, a former home affairs minister, and Julie Bishop, the country’s foreign minister.

Josh Frydenberg, who had been energy minister under the ousted prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, was elected deputy leader.

At a news conference shortly after the vote, Mr. Morrison said he and Mr. Frydenberg represented a “new generation” of Liberal Party leadership. After a week of contentious party infighting and back-room backstabbing, Mr. Morrison pledged to “heal our party.”

Many of Australia’s citizens complained this week that their leaders were too focused on political machinations at the expense of more important issues, including a drought that has wreaked havoc across the country for months. Mr. Morrison called the record-breaking drought the country’s “most urgent and pressing issue” and promised to make it his top priority.

Friday’s vote was the second challenge this week to the leadership of Mr. Turnbull, who himself assumed office by leading a party revolt in 2015.

But Mr. Morrison, 50, did not initiate the challenge. Rather, he backed Mr. Turnbull earlier in the week, then emerged as a more unifying alternative to Peter Dutton, a former home affairs minister known for his hard-line stance on immigration.

Mr. Dutton mounted the earlier, unsuccessful leadership challenge on Tuesday. After a week of turbulence that he ignited, he sought Friday to bolster the now-damaged Liberal Party as it moves closer to a general election expected in the coming months.

Okay….I accept the notion that college classes should be diverse….so here is a fictitious essay. Do you think this young man would gain acceptance?

” I am a senior lad applying to your school. Let me tell you about myself. I am Venezuelan and a victim of the depredations and suppression of the “socialism” that so dazzles American youth. My greatest dream has already come to pass. I am a proud American citizen anxious to master the language, mores and principles of those great founding fathers that made America the crown Jewel of the world.

I am a religious catholic who attends church every Sunday and prays every night after reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. These are the goals I pray for:

I hope to research, and find and develop products with a huge potential market. I hope that my company will grow and provide good wages and benefits to all employees- skilled in production, management and as well as to those less skilled who are the backbone of essential personnel. I hope that I will get married and have children and get rich.

I will distribute my putative wealth to those institutions that represent my politics, my values and my religion. I also want to contribute to the arts-classical music and ballet, museums, and to any academy that accepts me.

How much would you wager that this essay would be thrown into the dust bin in spite of the enticing the last last four words? rsk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/a_is_for_activist.html

It is dispiriting to note that those to whom we have entrusted the education of our children in the primary and public schools are woefully under-educated practitioners of the discipline. In an article titled “Educational Rot,” Walter Williams laments “the low academic quality of so many teachers.” Williams is referring to the abomination of teacher training colleges, which recruit the dregs of the graduate schools, catering to candidates “who have the lowest academic test scores.” The same applies to graduates of the gender studies programs in the universities, who, unfit for productive employment, often end up in the K-12 classroom. The damage such instructors do to the public school system and to our children is incalculable.

Trained to follow a leftist curricular agenda, a majority of K-12 teachers are set on molding the social justice warriors, anti-free market revolutionaries, radical environmentalists, global warmists, and feminist Furies of the future. The exclusion of the traditional focus on writing skills, effective reading, civics, maths and sciences, and the counter-emphasis on “social justice” themes in the public schools constitutes the first stage of the systematic dumbing down – what historian Niall Ferguson calls The Great Degeneration – that afflicts our society.

Thus, far too many students who emerge from these incubators, whether they are conscious of it or not, suffer not only from mental sluggishness, but from a kind of psychic immiseration. They compensate by trying to persuade themselves that they are useful and enlightened citizens when, for the most part, they are merely antisocial drones. The gene pool is not being chlorinated, as Wendy Northcutt suggests in her 2009 Darwin Awards romp; on the contrary, it is being increasingly contaminated.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/22/a-not-so

Today, the emperor to be feared is not Donald Trump, it is the D.C. mob itself, inflaming the nation via the media, both social and anti-social. And mob rule never ends well, neither for the country nor the mob.

Near the end of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, in the first century A.D., with the emperor having removed himself from Rome and living out his dissipated life on the isle of Capri, the Eternal City was gripped by a kind of madness. Plots and rumors of plots were everywhere; senators of high standing and noble birth were accused of everything from treason to the slightest trifle, and were executed—their veins were opened, they were strangled in jail, or they fell on their swords. Noblewomen were banished or murdered on whispers of adultery. To even associate with one who had fallen into the chaos of disfavor was tantamount to a death sentence.

Guilt-by-association was rampant, especially in the wake of the plot by Sejanus—as Prefect of the Praetorian Guard, once numbered among Tiberius’s intimates—against the emperor. Anyone associated with Sejanus effectively was liquidated. The madness persisted through the brief reign of Caligula, and extended into the rule of Claudius and, of course, Nero. Any chance Rome might have had of a restoration of the Republic vanished in a welter of blood and legal savagery. Forget Gibbon’s theory about the destructive nature of Christianity upon the Roman spirit: practically from the birth of Christ, the Empire had already sown the seeds of its destruction in the ambition, venality, and cruelty of men—and all based on a lust for absolute power.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/what-to-make-of-the-cohen-plea-and-manafort-convictionsAnalyzing the guilty plea of Trump’s onetime personal lawyer and the conviction of his former campaign chairman

Who would have thought that the conviction of his former campaign manager would be the good news for President Trump yesterday?
Cohen Plea

From a political standpoint, the guilty plea of the president’s lawyer Michael Cohen is the more damaging news. Cohen pled guilty to eight felonies. While the five counts of failure to pay taxes on over $4 million in income are the most consequential to him, most significant to the country are two counts of illegal “in kind” campaign contributions. These, of course, involve $280,000 in hush-money payments made prior to the 2016 election to two women who claim to have had sexual liaisons with Donald Trump, many years before. In entering his guilty plea in Manhattan federal court (the Southern District of New York), Cohen acknowledged that he was directed to make the payments by Donald Trump — referred to as “the candidate.”

Let’s split some legal hairs. The media narrative suggests that these payments violate federal law because they were made to influence the outcome of the election. That is not quite accurate. It was not illegal to pay hush money to the two women — Karen McDougal and Stephanie Clifford (a.k.a. “Stormy Daniels”). It was illegal for Michael Cohen to make in-kind contributions (which is what these pay-offs were) in excess of the legal limit.

Specifically, it was illegal for Michael Cohen to make contributions exceeding $2,700 per election to a presidential candidate (including contributions coordinated with the candidate); and illegal for the candidate to accept contributions in excess of that amount. It was also illegal for corporations to contribute to candidates (including expenditures coordinated with the candidate), and for the candidate to accept such contributions. The latter illegality is relevant because Cohen formed corporations to transfer the hush money.

The law does not impose a dollar limit on the candidate himself. Donald Trump could lawfully have made contributions and expenditures in excess of $2,700 per election. Because of that, and because — unlike Cohen — Trump is a non-lawyer who may not have fully appreciated the campaign-finance implications, it would be tough to prove that the president had criminal intent. Nevertheless, that may not get the president off the hook. As noted above, it is illegal for a candidate to accept excessive contributions. It is also illegal to fail to report contributions and expenditures, and to conspire in or aid and abet another person’s excessive contributions. Moreover, we are talking here about hush-money expenditures, so drawing a distinction between the payment and the failure to report is pointless since the intention not to report is implicit in this kind of payment.

As I argued when news of these pay-offs first emerged, the best arguments President Trump has here involve mitigation, not innocence.

The Justice Department has a history of treating serious campaign-finance transgressions as administrative violations, not felonies. A prominent example: The 2008 Obama campaign accepted nearly $2 million in illegal campaign contributions, but was permitted to settle the matter with a $375,000 fine. Of course, the force of that argument is undermined considerably by the fact that Cohen’s infraction has been treated as a felony (as was Dinesh D’Souza’s comparatively tiny one, also prosecuted by the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York).

Still, as we’ve repeatedly pointed out, Justice Department guidance does not permit the indictment of a sitting president. (A president may be prosecuted once he leaves office.) The issue for President Trump is not whether he has committed a crime but whether he has committed a high crime and misdemeanor. On that score, I will repeat what I said about mitigation in the aforementioned column, drawing on the lessons of the Clinton impeachment misadventure in the late Nineties:

The further removed misconduct is from the core responsibilities of the presidency, the less political support there will be for the president’s removal from office. This is critical because impeachment is a political remedy, not a legal one. The way the Framers designed the process — which requires just a simple House majority to file articles of impeachment, but a two-thirds Senate super-majority for removal — no president will ever be removed from office absent misconduct egregious enough to spur a consensus for removal that cuts across partisan lines. Such misconduct would surely have to involve either (a) an abuse of power involving core presidential powers; or (b) an extremely serious crime (if unrelated, or only tangentially related, to presidential power).

The conduct here is not of the egregious nature that rises to high crimes and misdemeanors — it is an infraction committed by many political candidates and often not even prosecuted. More to the point, it is remote from the core responsibilities of the presidency, implicating pre-election actions to conceal alleged indiscretions that occurred a decade earlier. And while the president has denied the indiscretions, it is not like the allegations come as any surprise to the public, who, while well aware of his flaws, elected Donald Trump nonetheless.

Of course, the Constitution vests judicially unreviewable power in the House of Representatives to determine what conduct amounts to high crimes and misdemeanors. We can hope that lawmakers honor the Framers’ guidance, but they cannot be forced to do so. If the Democrats take the House in November by a wide enough margin, expect that the Clinton rally cry — it’s just lies about sex — will no longer be in vogue.
Manafort Conviction

There is lots of spin out there to the effect that the jury’s partial verdict in Paul Manafort’s Virginia federal trial indicates that Special Counsel Mueller is playing a weaker hand than advertised. Don’t believe it. However untidy the verdict may look, and however embattled they may have appeared before a cantankerous judge, prosecutors got a sweep on the tax- and bank-fraud charges that the jury decided.

If the point of the case was to ratchet up the pressure on Manafort to cooperate with investigators, then: Mission accomplished. The 69-year-old defendant now faces a statutory maximum of upwards of 70 years’ imprisonment. And that doesn’t factor in that (a) he is looking at a money-laundering trial next month in Washington, a much friendlier venue for Mueller, and (b) there were no acquittals, so Mueller could also retry Manafort on the ten counts on which the jury hung.

We noted that the jury would not like accomplice witness Rick Gates and would be put off by the sweetheart plea deal he got, which did not include bank-fraud-conspiracy charges. Sure enough, it seems the jury convicted on counts as to which the documentary evidence of Manafort’s unreported income and fraud on financial institutions was overwhelming, but had trouble with charges as to which Gates’s testimony seemed more material. No matter. For Mueller, a win is a win, and this was a win.

The Trump camp continues to stress that Manafort’s case had nothing to do with the original rationale for Mueller’s investigation, “collusion with Russia.” But as we’ve pointed out any number of times, Mueller took over a counterintelligence investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Possible Trump-campaign collusion with Russia was just one thread in the larger probe.

At this point, it does not appear that Mueller has a collusion case against Trump associates. His indictments involving Russian hacking and troll farms do not suggest complicity by the Trump campaign. I also find it hard to believe Mueller sees Manafort as the key to making a case on Trump when Mueller has had Gates — Manafort’s partner — as a cooperator for six months. You have to figure Gates knows whatever Manafort knows about collusion. Yet, since Gates began cooperating with the special counsel, Mueller has filed the charges against Russians that do not implicate Trump, and has transferred those cases to other Justice Department components.

When it comes to the president, I believe the special counsel’s focus is obstruction, not collusion. When it comes to Manafort, I believe the special counsel’s focus is Russia — specifically, Manafort’s longtime connections to Kremlin-connected operatives. Mueller may well be interested in what Manafort can add to his inquiry into the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting (arranged by Donald Trump Jr. in futile hopes of obtaining campaign dirt from Russia on Hillary Clinton). That, however, is not the more serious “collusion” allegation that triggered the Trump thread of the investigation — cyberespionage conspiracy (i.e., Russian hacking of Democratic party emails). At this late stage, I’m betting Mueller is most interested in whatever information Manafort might provide regarding potential Russian threats to American interests.

I don’t think the special counsel’s report will accuse the president of collusion. I do think Mueller will try to illustrate that it was reckless for candidate Trump to bring a person of Manafort’s baggage into a high-level campaign post.