RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/josh-hawleys-plan-to-regulate-social-media-giants-draws-muted-response-on-capitol-hill/

Many Senate Republicans, and some Senate Democrats, appear to be taking a wait-and-see approach to the Missouri freshman’s controversial proposal.

One week ago today, freshman senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) introduced a bill requiring large social-media companies to prove to the Federal Trade Commission that their platforms are not politically biased. Failure to satisfy the FTC in this regard would result in companies such as Facebook and Twitter losing immunity from liability for defamatory content posted by their users, meaning they could be sued out of existence.

Hawley’s proposal drew sharp criticism from several voices on the right, including our own David French, who wrote that the bill is both unconstitutional and unwise. On Capitol Hill, there hasn’t been a groundswell of support for Hawley’s legislation, which currently has zero cosponsors. But neither has there been much pushback from Hawley’s Republican colleagues.

Representative Justin Amash (R., Mich.), a frequent thorn in his caucus’s side, tweeted that the bill is “a sweetheart deal for Big Government. It empowers the one entity that should have no say over our speech to regulate and influence what we say online.” But only one of more than a dozen Republican senators contacted by National Review expressed any criticism of Hawley’s legislation: Nebraska’s Ben Sasse, who “is not a co-sponsor of this government-control approach and has concerns that this could open the door to the left for a new government Fairness Doctrine,” his spokesman, James Wegmann, tells National Review.

“My gut reaction is it’s a pretty blunt instrument. But I’m going to take a look at it,” says John Kennedy of Louisiana.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/26/bias-at-tech-companies-hurts-americans-more-than-you-think/

So regarding this line from Peter Suderman’s piece, critiquing Sen. Josh Hawley and Sohrab Ahmari, titled “The Moral Scolds of the New Illiberal Right Are Coming For Your Internet”: “A private company, like Facebook or Twitter, suspending an account or deleting a post is no more censorship than a bar owner kicking out an unwelcome patron is censorship.”

That’s a particularly libertarian perspective. But is that really how people think about and define censorship? Or is that an uncommon definition at odds with one more commonly held by American citizens?

We have a current example relevant to this question from yesterday in the knitting site crackdown which will permanently ban any accounts posting content in support of Trump or his administration (as representing hate speech and endorsement of white supremacy).

Now, this may not seem like a big deal. But if you’re a mom in Wyoming who’s been making money off of selling your knitted projects for more than a decade – as one of our writers at The Federalist is – does anyone honestly think they don’t view that as censorship? That kids or family don’t view this as grandma getting censored just because of her support of one of the major political parties?

I doubt a narrow definition of censorship which is limited solely to governmental activity sounds that believable to most people. Of course it’s not a First Amendment violation; these are private businesses. But it is pretty obviously a form of market-based censorship: you can’t post on our marketplace if you think X or your product is perceived as supporting X. That view is a lot more common than the narrow “only the government can censor” view.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/so-many-democratic-candidates-so-many-bad-ideas/

So many people want to be president. Unfortunately, many have terrible ideas.

Sen. Kamala Harris wants companies to prove they pay men and women equally. “Penalties if they don’t!” she shouts. But there are lots of reasons, other than sexism, why companies pay some men more than women.

Harris also wants government to “hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms.” But “holding them accountable” means censorship. If politicians get to censor media, they’ll censor anyone who criticizes them.

Sen. Bernie Sanders wants the post office to offer banking services. The post office? It already loses billions of dollars despite its monopoly on delivering mail. Sanders also wants to increase our national debt by forgiving $1.6 trillion in student loan debt.

He wants to ban for-profit charter schools and freeze funding for nonprofit charters. That’s great news for some government-school bureaucrats and teachers unions that don’t want to compete but bad news for kids who flourish in charters when government schools fail.

Sen. Cory Booker once sounded better about charters, saying, “When people tell me they’re against school choice … or charter schools, I say, ‘As soon as you’re willing to send your kid to a failing school in my city … then I’ll be with you.'”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/25/project-veritas-bombshell-video-ruffles-some-feathers/

James O’Keefe’s explosive video exposing Google’s political agenda appears to have ruffled some feathers in the media world.

Jen Gennai, the Google executive seen talking to Project Veritas undercover journalists about Google’s plans to prevent “the next Trump situation,” has already published a response complaining that she was taken out of context.

And the bombshell video didn’t last even a full day on YouTube before it was removed from the platform.

YouTube, which is owned by Google, removed the video due to privacy complaints about the footage.

“We have strong privacy guidelines in place, including the ability to file a complaint if someone feels their privacy has been violated,” a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement. “When complaints are received, we may also provide the uploader a chance to remove or edit private information in their video.”

The powerful video can still be viewed on BitChute, Vimeo, and on Project Veritas’ website.

Meanwhile, Gennai, Google’s head of innovation, has weighed in on O’Keefe’s report at Medium.

In her piece, she complains that she was duped by Project Veritas and as a result, was being besieged by “an enormous collection of threatening calls, voicemails, text messages and emails, from people I’d never met.”

Yes, her crisis management team advised her to play the victim card:

Someone wrote “Your ideology will be shredded to pieces, just moments before you got executed for treason…you are living lended time, enjoy till then”. There were plenty more threats like this. I’ve never been so fearful.

https://quillette.com/2019/06/20/my-testimony-to-

Editor’s note: Coleman Hughes delivered the following testimony at a United States House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Bill H.R. 40 on June 19, 2019. If passed, the bill would establish a commission for reparations.

Nothing I’m about to say is meant to minimize the horror and brutality of slavery and Jim Crow. Racism is a bloody stain on this country’s history, and I consider our failure to pay reparations directly to freed slaves after the Civil War to be one of the greatest injustices ever perpetrated by the U.S. government.

But I worry that our desire to fix the past compromises our ability to fix the present. Think about what we’re doing today. We’re spending our time debating a bill that mentions slavery 25 times but incarceration only once, in an era with zero black slaves but nearly a million black prisoners—a bill that doesn’t mention homicide once, at a time when the Center for Disease Control reports homicide as the number one cause of death for young black men. I’m not saying that acknowledging history doesn’t matter. It does. I’m saying there’s a difference between acknowledging history and allowing history to distract us from the problems we face today.

In 2008, the House of Representatives formally apologized for slavery and Jim Crow. In 2009, the Senate did the same. Black people don’t need another apology. We need safer neighborhoods and better schools. We need a less punitive criminal justice system. We need affordable health care. And none of these things can be achieved through reparations for slavery.

Nearly everyone close to me told me not to testify today. They said that even though I’ve only ever voted for Democrats, I’d be perceived as a Republican—and therefore hated by half the country. Others told me that distancing myself from Republicans would end up angering the other half of the country. And the sad truth is that they were both right. That’s how suspicious we’ve become of one another. That’s how divided we are as a nation.

If we were to pay reparations today, we would only divide the country further, making it harder to build the political coalitions required to solve the problems facing black people today; we would insult many black Americans by putting a price on the suffering of their ancestors; and we would turn the relationship between black Americans and white Americans from a coalition into a transaction—from a union between citizens into a lawsuit between plaintiffs and defendants.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-fraudulent-paper-trail-through-the-anti-trump-c

Remember the simple rule: Anyone who pronounces on Trump–Russia from the baseline of, “Yes, the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC),” or its current, fuzzier iteration, “Russia interfered in the 2016 election,” is either directing, party to, or victim of a seditious campaign of deception against the U.S. people based on a series of untrustworthy if not downright fraudulent documents.

As a longtime student of “Russian interference,” I hasten to add I never rule out “Russian interference”; I just expect to find it inside the anti-Trump conspiracy. But that’s another story.

The outrageous fact is, a stack of dodgy documents makes up the shaky foundation of one of the most virulent attacks on our nation in history; to date, though, they have largely passed inspection. Even as they variously come under scrutiny and dispute, they remain in place, undergirding escalating attacks on the legitimacy of the 2016 election and the presidency of Donald Trump.

There is simply no coming to terms with this conspiracy inside the U.S. government until the U.S. people are able to recognize the fraudulence of the paper trail that got it started, and see that those involved in perpetrating these frauds upon us, the People, are, as we often say but never do, brought to justice.

I hate to say it, but I have a hard time believing we ever will see justice. Still, for the record, here is a list of dodgy documents that set us off on this dangerous voyage through U.S. sedition. Reading through, do bear in mind this rule of thumb from West’s Encyclopedia of American Law: “Evidence is not relevant unless its authenticity can be demonstrated.”