RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/robert-muellers-testimony-will-it-make-difference/

Plenty of Democrats, and more than a few Republicans, would like to see Robert Mueller testify before Congress despite the special counsel’s reluctance to appear. Each party has its reasons. Democrats want to score political points by re-litigating Mueller’s report on national television. Republicans want to ask him about when, exactly, he knew there was no criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, and about the origins of the investigation itself.

Some liberals go further. They say Mueller’s testimony might have a galvanizing effect on public opinion, and help convince voters that President Trump should be impeached. “If history is any guide,” writes Steve Benen at MSNBC, “the more Americans are confronted with damaging details about the president’s alleged misdeeds, the more the polls are likely to shift.”

Count me skeptical. While there have been slight ups and downs, for the most part polling on impeachment has been stable. The public continues to oppose it.

For example: In the November CNN exit poll, 40 percent of voters were for impeachment. After the release of the Mueller report, the debate over its findings, and Mueller’s press conference last week, CNN’s most recent poll of adults has support for impeachment at . . . 41 percent.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/9-times-the-obama-administration-fought-subpoenas-or-blocked-officials-from-testifying-before-congress/

After the long and thorough, and, of course, incredibly expensive Mueller investigation, Democrats were left distraught over a lack of any crime to justify going forward with impeachment. In the wake of the Mueller Report, they’ve since promised new investigations in the hopes of finding some crime to justify putting the country through a process that most don’t want us to go through just because Democrats haven’t gotten over the 2016 election. In recent weeks, stories about subpoenas being challenged and Trump officials being instructed not testify have been saturating the news and being presented as evidence of further obstruction. Most notably, Attorney General Barr faces a forthcoming vote of contempt in the House for not wanting to be a part of the Democrats’ witch hunt.

It seems as good a time as any to remind Democrats that we know their outrage is phony and that we know this is just pandering to their base who wants to see them “resist, resist, resist” at all costs. So, I’ve compiled nine examples of fights over subpoenas or testimony during the Obama years. The point here is that fights between the executive branch and the legislative branch over executive privilege are nothing new. Despite the rhetoric that the Trump administration’s fighting back against Democrat witchhunts being unprecedented, Barack Obama spent eight years fighting with Congress over their exercising their rights to oversight.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/06/05/muellers_sinking_reputation_140493.html

Now that Robert Mueller has closed up shop as special counsel and shot off fireworks at his final press conference, the country can step back and assess the job he did. The results are decidedly mixed.

Mueller made two vital contributions. The first was an in-depth investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. He concluded it was systematic and favored Donald Trump. The second was an intensive examination of possible coordination between the Russians and the Trump campaign. He concluded that no charges were warranted against any Americans.

The country needed those investigations and Mueller deserves praise for conducting them. More ambiguous was his non-finding of obstruction against the president, which, predictably, has been subject to deep partisan divisions.

Mueller’s two-volume report leaves several big, unanswered questions, though Democrats and Republicans differ on what they are. Democrats, focusing on the second volume, firmly believe Trump interfered with Mueller’s probe. All want further investigations; some want impeachment. Since the Senate is unlikely to convict — the evidence is too thin to win a two-thirds majority — the Democrats’ practical goal is to damage Trump’s chances in 2020. Their political problem, well understood by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is that a doomed effort will hurt the Democrats even more.

Republicans reject the obstruction claims, noting that Trump provided millions of documents and gave Mueller unprecedented access to White House staff. Even if Mueller believed he could not indict a sitting president, he could have said the evidence justified it. He made no such statement, though he did list some instances that might be considered obstruction.

Republicans add three more serious charges against Mueller. First, his team was packed with partisan Democrats, many closely affiliated with Hillary Clinton and strongly biased against Trump. Second, the report itself was shoddy and unfair, they say. It relied heavily on news articles, omitted exculpatory evidence, failed to investigate the infamous “Steele dossier,” and never asked why, if Russians were trying to penetrate the Trump campaign, the candidate himself was not told by the FBI. Another serious charge — deliberate distortion of evidence — comes from president’s former attorney, John Dowd. He has shown the Mueller report edited one of his phone calls to change its meaning. Dowd is apoplectic, calling the report a “fraud.” Others will join him if additional distortions, misrepresentations, and omissions are found.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/273937/jews-top-victims-hate-crimes-new-york-daniel-greenfield

The number of hate crimes in New York City jumped by 64 percent this year, officials said Tuesday, fueled by a major spike in attacks on Jews.

The New York Police Department recorded 184 hate crimes through June 2 — up from 112 in 2018 — during a period when the city experienced a continued reduction in overall crimes.

Of the 184 incidents, 110 targeted Jews, up from 58 in 2018.

There were 18 attacks motivated by the victim’s sexual orientation — up from 15 in 2018 — and 18 targeting victims who are black, up from 14, the NYPD said.

The next highest targeted group was whites, who were victims in 11 hate crimes, up from three in 2018.

The NYPD says 75 people have been arrested in connection with the crimes.

Is there actually an increase? 

I suspect the attacks are just being better documented by security cameras. We’ve seen a number of videotaped attacks this year.

But count on Mayor Bill de Blasio to stand by a politically correct distortion of reality.

Mayor Bill de Blasio said Tuesday that anti-Semitism is a “right-wing movement” — while rejecting a claim that the left plays any role in discriminating against Jews.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/04/from-occupy-to-aoc-the-rise-of-th

In the four years between Occupy Wall Street and Trump’s victory, the New Progressives made vast cultural gains and prepared to amass real power.

This is part two of a three-part series. Part one can be read here.

Incubation Under Obama

Barack Obama was a problem for the New Progressive movement. At Occupy Wall Street, many of his policies were attacked, but still with a kind of deference due to him being the first black president. And while Obama may have always been more leftist than he let on — for example, his abrupt “evolution” on gay marriage — he presented himself as a moderate.

Progressives, especially white progressives, had to be careful in attacking him. Some notable black progressives such as Tavis Smiley and Cornel West felt more comfortable taking aim, but in general the New Progressive movement had to bide its time.

During the four years from 2012-2016, the movement made spectacular cultural inroads with everything from movies to news to advertising to corporate culture. By the end of this period, terms like intersectionality and privilege theory had become household words.

In a recent and remarkable Twitter thread, Zack Goldberg shows graphs of searches on LexisNexis for far-left terms like privilege, intersectionality, and a host of others. They go from barely a blip to soaring heights in this period. The beginning of the upswing in almost every case is about 2010, but it wasn’t until 2012, just as the embers of Occupy were dying out, that the vast increases occur.

By the end of 2012-2016, a socialist very nearly became the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, and the New Progressives were poised to capture real political power.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/06/russiagate_and_the_missing_ducks.html

“In March 2018, the current [CIA] director, Gina Haspel, flatly lied to President Trump about an incident in the UK in order to persuade him to escalate measures against Moscow, which he then reluctantly did.  Several non–mainstream media outlets have reported the true story.  Typically, The New York Times, on April 17 of this year, reported it without correcting Haspel’s falsehood.”

Stephen Cohen of The Nation is consistently one of the best commentators on the Russiagate affair.

He just published another excellent piece analyzing “How Did Russiagate Begin?, which canvasses some possibilities and leans toward the explanation that it was (and is) an operation by U.S. intelligence agencies unhappy with the possibility that Trump will defuse our increasingly fractious relationship with Russia.

The whole article deserves attention, but one point he makes in passing is worth expanding.  Cohen notes:

In March 2018, the current [CIA] director, Gina Haspel, flatly lied to President Trump about an incident in the UK in order to persuade him to escalate measures against Moscow, which he then reluctantly did.  Several non–mainstream media outlets have reported the true story.  Typically, The New York Times, on April 17 of this year, reported it without correcting Haspel’s falsehood.

The reference is to the Skripal affair, in which the Russians, allegedly, used a nerve agent to poison a defector and his daughter.  The Brits responded with heavy sanctions, and the U.S., after some hesitation, did the same.  The story in the NYT said Trump agreed to the action only after Haspel showed him pictures, supposedly supplied to her by the British government, of collateral damage from the poisoning in the form of hospitalized children and dead ducks.

http://newswithviews.com/5g-a-plan-to-depopulate-earth/

Do you use a cordless telephone?  A cell phone?  A Smart phone?  A Smart television?  Wi-Fi?  A Wi-Fi router?  A Smart meter?  If so, for the sake of your own life and health, you need to read this article.  Information about health dangers is being withheld from you.

In the following explanations of a highly dangerous and new technology, the letter G means generation and generation refers to a set of requirements that determine a standard and what compatible devices and networks qualify for the standard. It also describes technologies that power new types of communication.  The letters EMF mean electromagnetic force/field.

It sounds like it’s going to be a dull, complicated article.  It’s not.  It’s an attempt to help you save your health (possibly life) and that of your children.

Consumer use of the technology which has made our lives so much easier is not the only important reason you need this information.  A new 5G (5th generation) technology is about to inundate us with EMFs (electromagnetic fields/forces) which, according to scientific research, are much higher than allowed in most of the technologically sophisticated world.  Will they de-populate America?

Comparison of our limit alongside other countries’ standards:

USA\Canada = 1000 microwatts /cm2 (same as ICNIRP 1998)
Australia = 200 microwatts /cm2
Auckland (New Zealand) = 50 microwatts /cm2
Italy, Russia, Poland, Luxembourg, Paris (France),   Hungary, Bulgaria, China, Switzerland = 2.4 to 10 microwatts /cm2
Salzburg (Austria) = 0.0001 microwatts /cm2

https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/03/from-occupy-to-aoc-the-rise-of-the-new-progressives-part-1/

This is part one of a three-part series.

The Occupation Will Be Televised

Over the past decade, a new and virulently illiberal progressive movement has taken shape in the United States. Centered around identity politics, control and censorship of speech, and proposed government takeovers of much of the economy, today’s New Progressive now sounds and looks almost identical to the radical fringe elements of leftism as recently as the late 1990s. Although the actual number of these New Progressives may be small, the movement has broad and approving reach in the media, and has become a disproportionally large part of the national political debate.

For conservatives it is essential to understand the origins and nature of this new progressivism. Although the cultural, economic, and political ideas that undergird this movement can be traced back to at the least the late 1960s and the emergence of European postmodern philosophy, in the American context, the most useful starting point for understanding what is happening today is Occupy Wall Street (OWS).

Occupy brought together three ideas for the first time that were formerly on the fringe. First is the idea that group identity bestows differing rights and obligations on individuals, rather than individuals all having equal rights and obligations. Second, OWS created the concept of a battle between the 99 percent and the 1 percent, which replaced a more nuanced approach on the left to how wealth is distributed. Finally, it offered a deep distrust of and desire to silence corporate entities that OWS claimed are not persons and therefore essentially have no rights.

Before delving into each, it useful to consider the backdrop and causes of Occupy Wall Street. On September 17, 2011, a group of protesters took over Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. The idea of the protest was first proposed by the Canadian progressive magazine Adbusters, and quickly gained the support of the Internet hacking organization Anonymous. From there, several other national and local progressive groups coordinated to create the occupation.

I spent a lot of time at Occupy Wall Street, first out of curiosity, then out of concern. Early on, there was a convivial feeling, a library was set up, and there was free food and music. The whole thing felt like an urban Woodstock. The message was “We are the 99 percent,” which placed blame on a small cabal of super rich and suggested that opposing and defeating them would be easy given vastly superior numbers.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/03/top-28-moments-from-bombshell-barr-interview/

The idea of resisting a democratically elected president and…really changing the norms on the grounds that we have to stop this president, that is where the shredding of our norms and our institutions is occurring.’

Attorney General William Barr’s nearly hour-long interview with CBS News’ Jan Crawford last week was full of fascinating details about the special counsel probe, the debunked Russia collusion theory that roiled Washington for years, and Barr’s investigation into how the FBI and Department of Justice used the “bogus” theory to investigate the Trump campaign.

The interview was downplayed by the media, which is implicated in perpetuating the Russia hoax Barr is investigating, and which came in for criticism from Barr for its failure to care about violations of civil liberties. Here are the top 28 take-aways from the interview.

1. Mueller ‘Could Have Reached a Conclusion’

Crawford, whose questions revealed a command of the facts not demonstrated by many of her mainstream media peers, asked Barr about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s decision to outline 11 instances where President Trump’s frustration at falsely being accused of treason could amount to “possible obstruction” followed by a refusal to decide whether they did.