RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/smearing-steven-menashi-11566761235

The Trump Administration is nominating more federal judges, and right behind comes the character assassination. The latest target is Steven Menashi, a highly regarded appellate lawyer who was acting general counsel in Betsy DeVos ’ Department of Education and now works in the White House counsel’s office. He was tapped this month for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

Progressive groups have been orchestrating a smear campaign in coordination with their media allies. Rachel Maddow opened the assault this month with a MSNBC monologue suggesting Mr. Menashi is a white nationalist. Her evidence? A 2010 article Mr. Menashi wrote for a University of Pennsylvania international-law journal that defended Israel as a liberal democracy and Jewish state.

Some on the left argue that Israel’s “right of return” immigration law for Jews is illegitimate because it excludes other groups. Mr. Menashi disputed this by describing comparable laws in Germany, Greece and Finland, which have welcomed back displaced nationals. He noted countries like India and Ireland take a special interest in their ethnic diasporas, and that this doesn’t diminish their democracies.

Ms. Maddow said this amounts to a “high-brow argument for racial purity.” After all, Mr. Menashi drew on that noted herrenvolk theorist Hannah Arendt, the Jewish chronicler of the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial, who once wrote that human rights “has been achieved so far only through the restoration or the establishment of national rights.”

Nation states often have an ethnic, linguistic and cultural basis. But Ms. Maddow said Mr. Menashi is on the “fringe of racial thinking.” If Senators take her seriously, they will confirm how far they have drifted to the anti-Israel fringe.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tragedy-of-the-times-11566596465

Thank you, Dean Baquet. Readers who complain about articles they don’t like, and who assume they are written under pressure from advertisers, could do worse than to study recent comments of the New York Times executive editor.

Mr. Baquet was secretly recorded at a staff meeting. A transcript was posted at Slate.com. But he has made similar points publicly. The gist: It’s readers nowadays who pressure newspapers to toe a line. Publishers pine for the era when advertising dollars insulated us from such pressures.

Under fire from its public for an anodyne and accurate headline about Donald Trump after the El Paso shootings, which the paper later changed, Mr. Baquet almost pleaded with his crew: “We are an independent news organization, one of the few remaining. . . . Our readers and some of our staff cheer us when we take on Donald Trump, but they jeer at us when we take on Joe Biden. They sometimes want us to pretend that he was not elected president, but he was elected president.”

If he meant a newspaper’s job is to report the facts and arrange them in a logical fashion regardless of the howling winds of reader prejudice, he’s right. Unfortunately it’s not clear this is what he meant.

To his credit, the Times has been one of a few news organizations that have refrained from labelling Mr. Trump a racist, as if this quality can be factually determined between the lines of his tweets. What Mr. Baquet is up against was illustrated by one of his own reporters, quoted in the Slate transcript saying, “I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/leftwing_institutions_mainstreaming_hatred.html

The contrasting reactions of conservatives and liberals to the news that libertarian philanthropist David Koch died and that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is suffering from a serious health problem highlight a fundamental difference between them.

Liberal Reaction to Death of Koch

Prominent liberals exploded in vicious joy at the news that Koch had died.  Perhaps the worst reaction was Bill Maher, who said, “F‑‑‑ him…I’m glad he’s dead, and I hope the end was painful.”  An outlier?  Hardly.  His audience roared its approval.

Bette Midler got in on the act, wishing his brother were also dead.  She echoed Maher’s profanity-bomb language and directed it at Kay Cole James, the black American leader of the Heritage Foundation, showing once again that no insult directed toward a minority is too vile when it comes from a liberal.

Social media are on fire with these types of screeds from these tolerant Americans who regularly lecture and project at Republican lack of civility. 

Whatever you think of his policy positions, David Koch should not have been a particularly controversial figure.  He was a successful business leader who gave billions to charity.  He was neither hateful nor petty.

He once said, “I really want to put my money to work making the world a better place.” 

His primary crime?  He supported Republicans, the one offense that still infuriates the Left.

Conservative Reaction to Ruth Bader Ginsburg News

Saturday also broke the news that Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suffered from a malignant tumor on her pancreas.  President Donald Trump’s reaction to this terrible news about someone who has been a fierce critic?  He said, “I hope she does really well.  I’m hoping she’s going to be fine.  She’s pulled through a lot. She’s strong, very tough.”

SHAME ON HIM!! RSK

https://pjmedia.com/trending/bill-maher-on-david-koch-death-im-glad-hes-dead-and-i-hope-the-end-was-painful/

Bill Maher made his bones in the entertainment world as a comedian. He should have stuck with stand-up.

His monologue from Friday’s Real Time on HBO simply can’t be believed:

Fox News:

“Real Time” host Bill Maher minced no words Friday night regarding the news that Republican megadonor and billionaire philanthropist David Koch had died at age 79 following a long battle with cancer.

“F— him… I’m glad he’s dead,” Maher said.

“And now, some funeral news to report. Yesterday David Koch of the zillionaire Koch brothers died .. of prostate cancer,” Maher said during his opening monologue, sparking some applause from his mostly liberal audience.

“I guess I’m going to have to re-evaluate my low opinion of prostate cancer.”

The HBO star joked that Koch’s family expressed gratitude that he “lived long enough to see the Amazon catch fire” and that condolences poured in “from all the politicians he owned.”

“As for his remains, he has asked to be cremated and have his ashes be blown into a child’s lungs,” Maher quipped.

After briefly acknowledging the “harsh words” he had for Koch and predicting condemnation, Maher doubled down on his disdain for him and his brother, Charles Koch.

“He and his brother have done more than anybody to fund climate science deniers for decades. So f— him, the Amazon is burning up, I’m glad he’s dead, and I hope the end was painful.”

Forget ideology. Forget politics. How does a civilized human being get to the point where voicing such sentiments is believed to be accepted by anyone in society — even political allies?

Thinking such thoughts is bad enough. Most of us would be ashamed of ourselves for celebrating anyone’s demise and hoping “the end was painful.” It’s barbaric. The words are disconnected from conscience in a way that makes Maher less human.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/cnn-hires-fired-fbi-deputy-director-andrew-mccabe-as-contributor/

Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe is joining CNN as an on-air contributor, the network’s media reporter Oliver Darcy announced Friday.

McCabe was fired from the FBI in March 2018 after the Department of Justice’s inspector general revealed that he’d repeatedly lied under oath to investigators about his role in leaking information on the bureau’s Clinton Foundation investigation to the Wall Street Journal. The Inspector General referred the matter to the U.S. attorney’s office for investigation and McCabe may still face criminal charges.

The 21-year FBI veteran maintains his innocence, arguing that he was misunderstood and tried to correct the record. He filed suit against the Trump administration in U.S. District Court in Washington earlier this month, alleging that his dismissal was “politically motivated and retaliatory.”

President Trump routinely disparaged McCabe as a political partisan during his time in the administration, often invoking his wife, Jill McCabe, who ran unsuccessfully for state senate in Virginia as a Democrat in 2015.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/facebook_censorship_blocking_conservative_thought_from_the_national_dialogue.html

Facebook has no pretenses about banning conservative thought.  Its censorship of conservative voices is not disguised.  It’s in your face.  The company’s arrogance shows that it believes that no one can do anything about it.  Or will.

I have just ended a seven-day stay in FB jail for an unspecified “offense.”  That means I was totally blocked from posting or commenting, even giving “likes,” on Facebook for a full week.  As a regular conservative Facebook-user, but still scratching my head on what exactly offended the people running Facebook, I was happy to be back.

As it turned out, my joy was premature.  To mark my return to FB, I attempted to post an article outlining the Obama-Brennan attempt to discredit and overthrow the Trump presidency.  It was the lead article on the conservative Drudge challenger, Whatfinger.com.  I don’t know that everything in the article was correct.  But the writer made a solid case.  There was no profanity, no violence, no personal attacks in the piece, nothing that could be regarded by any reasonable person as hate speech.  In fact, a lot of the story was repetition and summary of what has already been widely reported.  Bottom line: It was a well documented reveal on the Deep State and the illegal actions of the Obama-Brennan administration against Trump.

When I tried to post the story, a Facebook tag popped up that said, “Error. Your message couldn’t be sent because it includes content that other people on Facebook have reported as abusive.”  What?  What “other people”?  Which Democrat, Squad-supporting progressive, Brennan ally, Deep State operative snowflake was it?  What was “abusive” about what I was trying to post?  In fact, what does “abusive” in this context mean other than that it is a conservative point of view on current events?  Nevertheless, that’s how FB explained that it were blocking my post. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-new-york-times-reframes-history/

The New York Times’s 1619 Project purports to “reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.”

The Times, ostensibly a newspaper, wasn’t around in 1619 to publish the “first rough draft of history” for this period. So now it’s decided to rewrite it to its liking.

The New York Times was, however, around to publish the first rough draft of numerous other significant events in history. One that comes immediately to mind is the Stalin-era 1932 famine in which millions of Ukrainians died. The precise number of deaths (ranging from 3 million to 10 million) is lost to history, in part because the New York Times — per its Moscow bureau chief Walter Duranty — reported that “[a]ny report of famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.” The Times confidently informed the world that there was “no famine . . .nor is there likely to be.”

The Times got a Pulitzer for that titanic debacle and other articles that ignored  Stalin’s manifold atrocities. Maybe it should devote a tiny portion of its 1619 Project resources to reframing its    history of the Ukrainian famine.

More recently, Times leadership admits to dedicating the last two years of its vast reporting resources to the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. An American president elected with Russian assistance. The Times got another Pulitzer for this travesty. Then the Mueller report issued. Yet another major story the Times could reframe, perhaps by training as much attention on the involvement of the upper levels of the Obama administration in the hoax.

The list of “reframing” possibilities is endless. But the New York Times would do well to correct its own profound mistakes and biases before rewriting history to suit its ideological imperatives.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/21/facebook-audit-results-rile-liberals-and-conservatives/

Results of a Facebook audit released Tuesday, finding that the social media company has “significant work” to do to satisfy concerns from conservatives, are drawing criticism from both liberals and conservatives alike.

The eight-page report, authored by former Sen. Jon Kyl with Covington law firm in consultation with 133 conservative organizations, was inconclusive on whether the platform was biased in suppressing conservative views. The report, however, was written in a manner aiming to ease criticism of the company from Republicans and President Donald Trump, who often charge that the tech giant is part of a greater movement among large tech companies in Silicon Valley stifling conservative ideas on the internet.

Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who has been the leading Republican senator pushing for greater federal regulation of big tech, slammed the report as a “smokescreen disguised as a solution.”

Hawley proposed legislation in June stripping social media companies such as Facebook of liability protections granted under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act unless they consented to an external audit to prove political neutrality.

The Missouri senator argued the Kyl and Covington audit was whitewash and far from thorough, as the report was essentially a compilation of interviews. “Merely asking somebody to listen to conservatives’ concerns isn’t an audit,” Hawley said.

“Facebook should conduct an actual audit by giving a trusted third party access to its algorithm, its key documents, and its content moderation protocols,” Hawley said in a statement Tuesday. “Then Facebook should release its results to the public.”

Other conservatives have been critical of Kyl’s report.

Brent Bozell, the president of Media Research Center, a conservative nonprofit dedicated to exposing bias in the media, claimed the Facebook report released this week was “empty and insulting.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/08/20/cnns_wajahat_ali_white_supremacists_are_coming_for_all_of_us_trump_will_not_win.html

CNN contributor Wajahat Ali is asked what if “the squad” — the four Congresswomen led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) — used the same “anti-Semitic trope” that President Trump did Tuesday when he said Jewish Americans who vote for Democrats are disloyal. Ali, a Muslim, said Muslims are with Jews and they will not be divided by race or religion.

“So, what I’m telling everyone today is a very radical idea that Donald Trump is a racist president. He’s also an anti-Semitic president. He promotes white supremacist talking points,” Ali said Tuesday on ‘CNN Tonight’ with host Don Lemon.”We’re going unite, we’re going to have our disagreements about Israel,” Ali said of his newfound Jewish-Muslim brotherhood. “That’s fine. But we’re going to unite against the common threat that is coming against all of us which is white supremacy and Donald Trump, you will not win.”