RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jun/29/andy-ngo-beaten-up-by-antifa-activists-at-portland/

An Oregon photojournalist who covers Portland’s frequently violent protest scene was taken to the hospital Saturday after being attacked by black-masked antifa activists.

Andy Ngo, an editor at the online platform Quillette, said he was struck on the head and face “multiple times” by antifa protesters, who also threw objects and a milkshake at him as he tried to walk away.

The attack, recorded in part by the Oregonian and posted on Twitter, came during Saturday’s Rose City Antifa counter-protest against a rally held by the far-right group Proud Boys in downtown Portland.

Mr. Ngo had bloody cuts and bruises on his face, and his hair and shirt were covered with milkshake, as shown in a video he posted on Twitter shortly after the assault.

“I just got beat up by the crowd — no police at all — in the middle of the street,” Mr. Ngo said in the post. “And they stole my GoPro. And they punched me several times in my face and head, and I’m bleeding.”

Mr. Ngo, a right-leaning journalist who regularly films Portland’s protest activity, has written for the Wall Street Journal, National Review, RealClearPolitics and other publications.

Before the protest, Rose City Antifa had singled out Mr. Ngo in an online post promoting the “Community Self Defense Against Proud Boy Attack,” calling him a “[l]ocal far-right Islamophobic journalist.”

Video posts of Saturday’s clash showed a few dozen right-wing activists holding a rally while hundreds of counter-protesters marched in the street amid a heavy police presence.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/trump-must-fight-back-against-big-tech-corporate-control-or-risk-losing-a-winnable-election/

It comes as no surprise that Trump is constantly assaulted by the media, the Democrats, desultory members of his own party, the churches, the “Deep State,” late-night comics, the entertainment industry and by those euphemistically known as the “coastal elites.” After all, he is a member of that rare breed of political personage who put the nation before themselves; in other words, he is a principled president, which is anathema to the host of ideologues and sycophants who constitute the political class and the cultural establishment.

This has been the case since his early candidacy, continuing into the present moment in which his successes concerning the economy, trade, a refractory or hostile international community and border insurgency are regarded as errors of judgment or signs of personal hubris. Notwithstanding, just as Obama is correctly perceived by the more honest and astute observers on the current scene as the worst president in the history of the republic, intent on dismantling a great nation, Trump is seen by many as the best president since Reagan and among the best since Abraham Lincoln.

I would hazard that Trump actually won the popular vote in 2016 despite the reprehensible conduct of the Democrats whose electoral numbers arguably owed much to the unscrupulous rigging of the voting process. Clearly, Trump did not win the dead vote, the multiple vote, the uncounted vote and the unreported vote, yet managed to triumph despite the odds. I have no doubt that he would succeed again, perhaps handily, in the coming election, once more proving the biased and conniving pollsters catastrophically wrong—but only assuming that he recognizes where the real threat to a second term is coming from.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-contradictions-of-john-roberts-11561676526

Chief Justice John Roberts is the Supreme Court’s new swing vote, and he’s proving he won’t be pinned down by the law or judicial philosophy. His decision to join the four liberal Justices on Thursday to block a citizenship question on the Census is wrong on the merits and threatens larger damage to the Constitution’s separation of powers.

The question in Department of Commerce v. New York was whether Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross acted within his purview in reinstating a citizenship question on the 2020 Census. That’s not the question the Court ended up deciding. Instead, the Chief held that although Mr. Ross acted lawfully, his motives appear to have been less than pure.

Congress has delegated to the Commerce Secretary broad discretion to conduct the Census “in such form and content as he may determine.” It’s indisputable that Mr. Ross had the legal authority to add the citizenship question. But Democratic states argued that he violated the Administrative Procedure Act by overruling Census Bureau bureaucrats who claimed the question could reduce response rates.

According to the states, a citizenship question could result in a population undercount that would reduce their federal funding and representation in Congress. They also claimed the question was motivated by racial animus toward Hispanics and intended to help Republicans gerrymander. There was scant evidence for either claim.

In a memo explaining his decision, Mr. Ross noted that the Justice Department had requested that the Secretary reinstate the citizenship question to gather more granular data to enforce the Voting Rights Act. The data could be useful in reviewing the make-up of majority-minority districts in which a majority of voters are members of a racial or ethnic minority.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/neglecting-foreign-policy-in-the-presidential-debates/?utm_source=ntnlreview&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=amconswap

The second night of the first Democratic 2020 presidential debate had even less discussion of foreign policy than the first. Were it not for a few of the candidates themselves choosing to bring up some of these issues, the audience would have heard almost nothing about foreign policy. There was one important moment when Biden was forced to address his 2002 vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq, and he gave a remarkably bad answer that was consistent with his overall poor performance. It was striking how the former Vice President still had no answer for why voters should trust his judgment.

Biden’s answer was scattershot, and most of what he said wasn’t related to the Iraq war:

Because once we — once Bush abused that power, what happened was, we got elected after that. I made sure — the president turned to me and said, Joe, get our combat troops out of Iraq. I was responsible for getting 150,000 combat troops out of Iraq, and my son was one of them.

I also think we should not have combat troops in Afghanistan. It’s long overdue. It should end.

And, thirdly, I believe that you’re not going to find anybody who has pulled together more of our alliances to deal with what is the real stateless threat out there. We cannot go it alone in terms of dealing with terrorism.

So I would eliminate the act that allowed us to go into war, and not — the AUMF, and make sure that it could only be used for what its intent was, and that is to go after terrorists, but never do it alone. That’s why we have to repair our alliances. We put together 65 countries to make sure we dealt with ISIS in Iraq and other places. That’s what I would do. That’s what I have done. And I know how to do it.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/28/california-legislature-passes-bill-put-trans-men-womens-prisons-even-rapists/

While it should be obvious that women’s prisons are for convicted criminals who are female, California Senate Bill 132, sponsored by state Sen. Scott Weiner (D–San Francisco), requires men who say they are women to be housed in women’s prisons.

The State Senate passed the bill in May, and it passed the state Assembly with very little opposition on June 25. The bill demands that the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation ask prisoners their preferred pronouns and gender identity at intake, then house them accordingly. This means that a man need only say at intake that he is a woman to gain access to women’s prison. In passing this bill, California has turned its back on incarcerated women.

In describing the bill, the Legislative Council’s Digest states:

The bill would require staff and contractors to consistently use the gender pronoun and honorific an individual has specified in verbal and written communications with or regarding that individual that involve the use of a pronoun or honorific. The bill would require the department, for a person who has a gender identity that differs from their sex assigned at birth, to only conduct a search of that person by an officer of the gender identity of the person’s preference, and to house the person in a correctional facility designated for men or women consistent with the incarcerated individual’s gender identity, except as specified.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/28/former-president-jimmy-carter-said-trump-not-legitimately-elected/

Former President Jimmy Carter said he believes President Donald Trump’s election was illegitimate and that “he didn’t actually win the election in 2016.”

At a Carter Center event in Virginia with author Jon Meacham, Carter said that Russian interference in the 2016 election invalidated Trump’s presidency, reported USA Today’s Susan Page.

“I think the interference, though not yet quantified, should be fully investigated and would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016, he lost the election,” he said.

“He was put into office because the Russians interfered,” he said. Carter was then asked if that meant he believed Trump was illegitimate.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/06/28/roberts-the-mind-reader-joins-liberal-justices-on-the-census/

The Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 ruling on Department of Commerce v. New York is being characterized as nothing more serious than a temporary setback regarding President Trump’s wish to reinstate a citizenship question in the 2020 U.S. Census; the administration is expected to whip up a new rationale that the high court won’t consider “contrived” and get the question in.

Unfortunately it is far worse than that, and Chief Justice John Roberts is giving further sign that he is yet another unpleasant surprise in GOP appointments to the highest level of the Judicial Branch, following in the footsteps of David Souter (Bush 41), Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor (Reagan), and John Paul Stevens (Ford).

“The Court’s holding reflects an unprecedented departure from our deferential review of discretionary agency decisions,” Justice Clarence Thomas warns in his dissent, joined by Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. “And, if taken seriously as a rule of decision, this holding would transform administrative law … the Court has opened a Pandora’s box,” Thomas declared.

Motivated by politics and ideology, lawyers would challenge all sorts of Executive Branch decisions “with accusations of pretext, deceit, and illicit motives” leading to “an endless morass of discovery and policy disputes,” Thomas cautions. “Now that the Court has opened up this avenue of attack, opponents of executive actions have strong incentives to craft narratives that would derail them. Moreover, even if the effort to invalidate the action is ultimately unsuccessful, the Court’s decision enables partisans to use the courts to harangue executive officers through depositions, discovery, delay, and distraction.”

https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/27/obamas-top-unmasker-bashed-conspired-trump-using-government-email/

President Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, used her government email to bash Donald Trump before and after the 2016 election, according to documents uncovered by the American Center for Law and Justice.

Power infamously abused authority in the unprecedented unmasking of hundreds of Americans working with the Trump campaign, and the latest documents add to the evidence of her acting on her anti-Trump sentiments in an official capacity.

Starting before the GOP primaries, in an email connecting Oskar Eustis, the artistic director at the Public Theater in New York, with scholar Norman Ornstein, Power commented that a Trump win in the New Hampshire primary would make politics no longer rational.

“Oskar, Norm will explain our political system, in a way that will fleetingly make it seem rational, though maybe not after Trump and Sanders win NH,” she wrote.

The Hill reports that several emails provide ample evidence of the diplomat’s Trump-bashing after the election.

In December 2016, for example, when sent a news story about Trump’s effort to communicate a new policy direction for the U.N., Power snarkily replied: ‘This reflects the lack of understanding of history.’

When Trump announced his intent to withdraw the U.S. from a global climate deal, Power emailed a colleague: ‘Lord help us all.’

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/450481-20-questions-for-robert-mueller

The “American Sphinx” will be called to Congress on July 17 to provide answers to our most intriguing questions. Special counsel Robert Mueller spoke only briefly about his Trump-Russia report on May 29 and made clear that he was appointed to ask, not to answer, questions. He said “the report is my testimony” and added: “I hope and expect this will be the only time I speak to you in this manner.”

Sphinxes, of course, are not accustomed to answering questions. And speaking to a sphinx is a precarious practice since, according to mythology, you would be devoured if you got her answers wrong. Of course, Mueller may be aware that, when a sphinx is outsmarted, it is the end of the sphinx. In mythology, the Sphinx threw herself from a great height.

When Mueller ascends Capitol Hill, the question is whether he will take a pass or a header from that great height. If he sticks with his earlier position, he will do little but repeat findings from the report. If, however, Congress truly wants to question this sphinx, here are 20 questions to ask. Most concern the process or the law that should not be subject to any privilege or confidentiality claims as a basis for refusing to answer.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2019/06/26/top-u-s-non-profit-hospitals-ceos-are-racking-up-huge-profits/#362955119dfb

The rising cost of healthcare is undermining the American Dream. Families who are working hard to get ahead now pay nearly $20,000 per year in insurance premiums, deductibles, and out-of-pocket costs for healthcare.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com looked at America’s healthcare system and found that so-called “non-profit” hospitals and their CEOs are getting richer while the American people are getting healthcare poorer.

Our new oversight report Investigating The Top 82 U.S. Non-Profit Hospitals, Quantifying Government Payments and Financial Assets specifically looked at large nonprofits organized as charities under IRS Section 501(c)3 with the mission of delivering affordable healthcare to their communities.

We found that these hospitals add billions of dollars annually to their bottom line, lavishly compensate their CEOs, and spend millions of dollars, which are generated by patient fees, lobbying government to defend the status quo.

Last year, patients spent 1 out of every 7 U.S. healthcare dollars within these powerful networks. Many are household names like Mayo Clinic* in Rochester, MN; Cleveland Clinic*, in Cleveland, OH; and Partners HealthCare in Massachusetts.