RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.us/furious-mueller-report-america/

“What has happened over the past two-plus years is a fundamental attack on the legitimacy of our democratic republic. Tactical partisan maneuvering has overwhelmed the institution of presidential elections. Note that this is a one-party party. It probably started in earnest with the election of George W. Bush in 2000. Al Gore withdrew his concession and put the country through months of legal wrangling. Republicans were unhappy when Barack Obama was elected in 2008 and again in 2012. But there was no question of his legitimacy. But when Donald Trump won in 2016, the sort of antidemocratic forces that beset George Bush had mutated from an angry squad of activists into an army of deniers.”

OK, Possums, here it is in redact and white (drum roll, please): The Mueller Report, 448 color-coded pages, replete with almost 900 redactions. Who says the government isn’t effective at education: over the last months it expanded the vocabulary of many Americans by putting that nice word into general circulation.So quickly was the report edited and rushed into print that the Surgeon General’s warning against operating heavy machinery while or shortly after dosing up on the report was omitted. So let me supply the defect and warn you: the report is boring.

After Jerry Nadler’s commandos finish poring over it for dirt and discard the tome in frustrated disgust, the authorities are planning to collect the remaindered copies of the report and make them mandatory punitive reading in penitential institutions around the country.

The former newspaper known as The New York Times made a manful attempt to skew the results of the report, offering a pathetic ‘live analysis’ of cherry-picked excerpts. But Donald Trump is right. As anyone not named Bill Kristol has suspected for months, and known since the Mueller report was delivered to Attorney General Barr last month, it’s Game Over: finis, end of the line, thank you all for coming, the egress is just over yonder.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/rod-rosenstein-has-a-few-choice-words-for-media-fbi-leakers-and-obama-administration/

During an event in New York City, Thursday evening, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein shared his feelings about the special counsel’s Russia investigation, while throwing shade on critics, politicians, the media and the Obama administration.

Speaking at a dinner where he was honored by the Armenian Bar Association, Rosenstein defended his handling of the probe, recalling how he had promised to “do it right” during his Senate confirmation hearing and to “take it to the appropriate conclusion.”

“It’s not our job to render conclusive factual findings. We just decide whether it is appropriate to file criminal charges,” Rosenstein noted.

“‘You’re going to be in charge of this [Russia] investigation. I want you to look me in the eye and tell me that you’ll do it right, that you’ll take it to its conclusion and you’ll report [your results] to the American people,'” he said the senator told him.

Rosenstein agreed to the first two things the senator asked, but then explained, “I did not promise to report all results to the public, because grand jury investigations are ex parte proceedings. It is not our job to render conclusive factual findings. We just decide whether it is appropriate to file criminal charges.”

He said that there were “some critical decisions” about the investigation that had been made before he got there. “The previous administration,” he added, “chose not to publicize the full story about Russian computer hackers and social media trolls, and how they relate to a broader strategy to undermine America.”

Rosenstein added that “the FBI disclosed classified evidence about the investigation to ranking legislators and their staffs, lawmakers and their staffers,” and then “someone selectively leaked details to the news media.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/25/how-the-mueller-report-covers-for-clinton-and-the-conspirators/

On April 10, Attorney General William Barr got to the heart of the Russia collusion hoax in a delicate and understated manner.

“Well, I guess—I think spying did occur, yes,” he told a congressional panel. “I think spying did occur. . . . The question was whether it was adequately predicated.”

The term “spying” is actually a euphemism for what really happened. In reality, starting an investigation to create suspicion and a fountain of leaks to frame political opponents to win an election is just the kind of thing Putin did in Russia to subvert what little democracy started to take root after the fall of the old Soviet government. In a way, framing somebody for treason is worse than treason because of the damage it does to the rule of law.

There are two competing narratives for the “predicate” for spying on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign: (1) The Papadopoulos pretext and, (2) the obvious truth. If you want to know why the Left is melting down over Barr’s “spying” comments, it’s very simple: the real “predicate” for spying on Trump is a phony intelligence report commissioned by Hillary Clinton to win an election.

But that’s not the story we’ve been fed.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273567/mueller-files-lloyd-billingsley

“When did Mueller become God?” wondered Rudy Giuliani after release of the Mueller report. The Trump attorney and former New York mayor was not alone in such sentiments.

On his Fox News program, Mark Levin blasted the Mueller report as a 400-page, $35 million op-ed that amounts to an “impeachment report.” And after the finding of “no collusion,” the Democrat-media axis quickly pivoted to the obstruction of justice narrative.

“Was Robert Mueller Colluding with Russia?” wondered Christopher Roach at American Greatness. “What could possibly sow more discord,” Roach notes, “than suggesting the president broke the law and stole an election by treacherously teaming up with a hostile foreign power?” That is hardly the only question about the special counsel with the Easter Island stone face, a runner-up for the Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” award last year.

Like his pal James Comey, Mueller was not an FBI man who rose through the ranks. Even so, two months before 9/11, Mueller defended the FBI over blunders such as Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Robert Hanssen, the FBI man who spied for Russia. Mueller proclaimed that, if confirmed, “I will make it my highest priority to restore the public’s confidence in the FBI and to re-earn the faith and trust of the American people.”

https://www.city-journal.org/connecticut-highway-toll-proposal

Supported by 2018’s Blue Wave, Connecticut Democrats retained the governorship and large majorities in the state legislature. The national trend seems like the only explanation for their electoral success, considering the state’s dismal economic performance and chronic fiscal crisis during the prior eight years of unitary Democratic governance. After signing two of the largest tax hikes in state history, Dannel Malloy left office as the second-most unpopular governor in the nation. Even with the second-highest tax burden of any state, Connecticut has the second-highest unfunded pension liability in the U.S. The state economy remains smaller than before the financial crisis.

Democratic candidates for state office ran against President Trump and away from their own records. New governor Ned Lamont, though hardly a fresh face, campaigned with the slogan “the change starts now.” Democrats won state senate upsets in traditional Republican strongholds like Greenwich and Wilton, with candidates promising to be “a different kind of Democrat” or a “fiscal moderate.” The incumbent party won an ironic mandate for change.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/25/5-times-mueller-probe-broke-prosecutorial-rules-ensure-justice/

CNN recently published an article arguing that Special Counsel Robert Mueller should not have issued a report suggesting the president may have committed obstruction of justice without actually reaching this conclusion. CNN is obviously disappointed because inside the leftist echo chamber the obstruction case seems undisputable.

For example, the Mueller report suggests that the president committed some kind of sin for wanting to fire former FBI director James Comey for being a party to the plot to blackmail or frame the president. Some believe presidents should fire FBI chiefs who participate in hoaxes against their boss.

Mueller did no favor to CNN’s client Democrats, who now face three terrible choices: (1) Impeach President Trump using their majority in the House, which will lead to a self-destructive trial in the Senate; (2) Drop it and move on in defiance of a rabid get-Trump base; or (3) use their majority in the House to drag the country through a Mueller 2.0 investigation, which runs the risk of distracting from Democratic messaging in the upcoming 2020 election.

Like Aesop’s scorpion on the frog’s back, the partisans on Mueller’s team just couldn’t help themselves. The Mueller report poisons public opinion without bringing charges. It should have been written on a postcard, because the outcome of a criminal proceeding is binary: Guilty or not guilty. There’s no middle ground under constitutional principles. President Trump is not guilty until the Senate convicts him otherwise.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/mueller-investigation-pious-hypocrisy/

Mueller’s team went down every blind alley relating to its investigation — except where Obama-era officials were likely culpable for relevant unethical or illegal behavior.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s two-year, $30 million, 448-page report did not find collusion between Donald Trump and Russia.

Despite compiling private allegations of loud and obnoxious Trump behavior, Mueller also concluded that there was not any actionable case of obstruction of justice by the president. It would have been hard in any case to find that Trump obstructed Mueller’s investigation of an alleged crime.

One, there was never a crime of collusion. Mueller early on in his endeavors must have realized that truth, but he pressed ahead anyway. It is almost impossible to prove obstruction of nothing.

Two, Trump cooperated with the investigation. He waived executive privilege. He turned over more than 1 million pages of administrative documents. He allowed then–White House counsel Don McGahn to submit to over 30 hours of questioning by Mueller’s lawyers.

Three, anyone targeted by a massive investigation who knows he is innocent of an alleged crime is bound to become frustrated over a seemingly never-ending inquisition.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/

When Bill de Blasio took office as the new Mayor of New York City back in 2014, many on the right looked at his policy prescriptions and predicted the rapid reversal of the City’s economic revival, potentially followed by rapid economic collapse. But not me! As I had originally written in this post of April 16, 2013, the consequence of bad — even disastrous — economic policy is not immediate economic collapse, but rather what I called “gradual relative decline.” That post looked particularly at Venezuela, then 15 years into the rule of Hugo Chavez, and far into the process of adopting over-the-top socialist policies that a Comsymp NYC Mayor could only dream about — everything from nationalization of most of the economy, to doubling the size of the state sector, to government deficit of 15% of GDP, and so forth. And yet, in its official (fraudulent) statistics, Venezuela was still showing economic growth, just not as fast as the growth in countries that allowed private enterprise to flourish.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/04/24/justices_seem_ready_to_ok_asking_citizenship_on_census_140145.html

Despite evidence that millions of Hispanics and immigrants could go uncounted, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed ready Tuesday to uphold the Trump administration’s plan to inquire about U.S. citizenship on the 2020 census in a case that could affect American elections for the next decade.

There appeared to be a clear divide between the court’s liberal and conservative justices in arguments in a case that could affect how many seats states have in the House of Representatives and their share of federal dollars over the next 10 years. States with a large number of immigrants tend to vote Democratic.

Three lower courts have so far blocked the plan to ask every U.S. resident about citizenship in the census, finding that the question would discourage many immigrants from being counted. Two of the three judges also ruled that asking if people are citizens would violate the provision of the Constitution that calls for a count of the population, regardless of citizenship status, every 10 years. The last time the question was included on the census form sent to every American household was 1950.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/04/24/unemployment-claims-lowest-since-1969-despite-workforce-twice-the-size-as-trump-economy-roars-ahead/

The U.S. Labor Department reports that for the third week in a row, unemployment claims have hit low levels not seen since September of 1969 and that the less volatile four-week moving average has reached lows last achieved in November of 1969. What makes this milestone stunning is that the unemployment claims number is not adjusted for how many people are in the labor force, and today there are almost twice the number of people in the workforce as in 1969.

That’s right. We have twice the workforce size and the same number of people claiming unemployment, a sure-fire sign that the economy is robust. Based upon our nation’s economic history, the economy would be in good shape even if 50 percent more people were filing unemployment claims each week.

Yet, on the retail side of the equation, the transition from brick and mortar retail shops to cyber-shopping is having an impact. Sears is gone. Toys ‘R’ Us is gone. Payless is gone.