RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272269/visamastercard-and-assault-civil-rights-wallace-nunn

Every day there is a new report about how Facebook, Google, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and other giants of social media censor content, banish certain commentators for incorrect views, and otherwise work in a steady if unsystematic way to homogenize political opinion within an acceptably progressive bandwidth. Ideas are scoured for “racism”—as contentiously defined by the intellectual stylebook of the hard left Southern Poverty Law Center, which the media have set up as an “authority” on hate speech; freedom of speech is seen a nuisance rather than a guarantee of personal liberty and true diversity of opinion.

But there is an even more sinister threat to the first amendment than the social media, a threat that operates in a stealth way in the most crucial arena of our economic system. It is corporate giants Master Card and Visa, which now use their unparalleled financial power to determine what speech should be allowed and what speech should be silenced.

Most Americans use a credit or debit card everyday and take these two corporations as much for granted as the light switch or the automobile ignition. We buy things with their cards ranging from the annual vacations to the daily groceries. These two interlocked corporations are the drum majors marching us into a cashless society. They are powers unto themselves, but their eminence rests on our money and the fees they exact to accommodate our transactions.

The cards they issue are even more critical to the vendors whom they pay. Without the ability to accept charges to these cards as payment many businesses would in effect be out of business.

Unlike the comparatively clumsy and very public efforts of the social media to erase “offensive”—all too often a synonym for conservative—opinion, the cognate machinations of Visa/Mastercard take place more remotely and without response in the dark space of the mundane financial transaction.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/12/comey_ducks_question_about_his_memos_leaking_classified_information_turns_away.html

Following his closed-door testimony yesterday, James Comey held an impromptu 8-minute news conference to spin the media with his attacks on Trump, Republicans, and even Fox News. I found his smug self-righteousness nauseating, to be blunt. If you want to watch the whole thing, I have embedded MSNBC’s video at the bottom of this blog.

But first, take a look at how he handled the one probing question that (of course) came from Catherine Herridge. She asked if there was any “spill” of classified information from his leak.

Comey’s response:

“I’m not gonna talk about something like that.”

The he turned away from Heridge with a grim smile, closed his eyes briefly, and moved on, asking for another question. Nobody in the press corps tried to follow up.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/with-fbi-misconduct-against-flynn-revealed-mueller-obstruction-probe-evaporates/

The FBI set former national security advisor Michael Flynn up.

That is about all we can make of the latest revelation that the FBI made serious breaches of protocol when it set up the Jan. 24, 2017, meeting with Flynn to ask him about his Dec. 2016 conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kisylak. We now know the FBI did not go through the White House counsel first, suggest Flynn have a lawyer present, or advise him of his rights prior to the interview. Former FBI director James Comey even appeared on MSNBC to brag about the breach, stating:

[This was] something I probably wouldn’t have done or wouldn’t have gotten away with in a more organized administration. … In the George W. Bush Administration or the Obama Administration, if the FBI wanted to send agents into the White House itself to interview a senior official, you would work through the White House counsel, there would be discussions and approvals and who would be there. And I thought, it’s early enough let’s just send a couple guys over.

The Justice Department and the FBI engaged in misconduct in the questioning of Flynn, and it ought to result in overturning Flynn’s conviction. We’ll see what Judge Emmet Sullivan does for Flynn’s sentencing.

In the meantime, it seems useful to retrace our steps to how we got to this point.

The only reason Flynn was questioned in the first place is because somebody in the Obama administration illegally leaked his conversation with Kislyak to the Washington Post’s David Ignatius on Jan. 12, 2017. Conducting damage control, Vice President Mike Pence appeared on CBS to say sanctions were not discussed. So what crime was the FBI investigating on Jan. 24, 2017? Why question Flynn at all about his conversation with the ambassador — other than to see if he’d lie or had forgotten the substance of the conversation, that is?

The Washington Examiner’s Byron York reported on Dec. 3, 2017:

Former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates has told Congress that the Logan Act was the first reason she intervened in the Flynn case — the reason FBI agents were sent to the White House to interview Flynn.

But it wasn’t the Logan Act, an unenforced ancient U.S. law that — unconstitutionally — forbids private individuals from undermining U.S. foreign policy abroad. Just the day before the interrogation on Jan. 23, the Washington Post published a big report on Flynn’s conversation with the ambassador, stating that the FBI had investigated and found no crime. Were they just trying to lull Flynn into a sense of complacency?

It seems improper for the FBI to interrogate somebody for something the FBI didn’t even believe was a crime. Ultimately, as it is, Flynn was never charged by Mueller with any Logan Act violations — probably because they could not be supported. Americans have First Amendment rights, after all. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/12/17/obamacare-individual-mandate-courts-congress-john-roberts-column/2330806002/
Health care law supporters will have to show that the years of arguing it cannot function without the individual mandate were hyperbole or irrelevant.

When federal Judge Reed O’Connor effectively struck down the Affordable Care Act on Friday, there was a chorus of shock and dismay across the country from politicians and pundits alike. However, the decision is in many ways a bill come due for a number of key players in the ACA’s history. Not the least of them is Chief Justice John Roberts. Roberts saved the ACA in 2012 by defining a key provision as a tax. That tax is now gone and, with it, Roberts’ very narrow rationale for preserving the original health care scheme.

The seeds for this decision were planted long before the challenge was filed by Texas and 19 other states. From the outset, the constitutionality of the ACA was questioned by some of us due to the inclusion of the “individual mandate” which required all Americans to purchase health insurance. That provision immediately raised objections under federalism principles. Congress was penalizing individuals and states for the failure to buy a product and then regulating that failure under the claim of Interstate Commerce.

A majority of justices viewed that scheme as a violation of states rights. However, the Obama administration and the Democrats argued that the individual mandate was the thumping heart of the ACA and it could not live without it. This argument was repeated before the Supreme Court, which voted 5-4 to preserve the individual mandate as both constitutional and essential to the ACA.

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/421634-alan-dershowitz-did-michael-flynn-lie-or-did-the-fbi-act-improperly

The media is asking the wrong question about the Michael Flynn case. They are asking whether Flynn lied or the FBI acted improperly, as if the answers to those two questions are mutually exclusive. The possibility that both are true, in that Flynn did not tell the truth and that the FBI acted improperly, is not considered in our hyper partisan world where everyone, including the media, chooses a side and refuses to consider the chance that their side is not perfectly right and the other side not perfectly evil.

The first casualty of hyper partisanship is nuance. So when nuance is condemned as being insufficiently partisan, truth quickly becomes the next casualty. Flynn, during his brief time as national security adviser to President Trump, told FBI agents untruths that are contradicted by hard evidence. Why he did that remains a mystery because, with his vast experience in intelligence gathering, he must have known that the FBI had hard evidence of the conversations he denied having with a Russian diplomat. Be that as it may, this reality does not automatically exclude the possibility that the FBI acted improperly in eliciting untruths from him.

The FBI knew the truth. They had recordings of the conversations. Then why did they ask him whether he had those conversations? Obviously, not to learn whether he had them but, rather, to give him the opportunity to lie under oath so that they could squeeze him to provide incriminating information against President Trump. If you do not believe me, read what Judge T.S. Ellis III, who presided over the Paul Manafort trial, said to the prosecutors: “You do not really care about Mr. Manafort’s bank fraud. What you really care about is what information Mr. Manafort could give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump or lead to his prosecution or impeachment.”

https://spectator.us/trump-government-shutdown-bipartisan/

Sometime back in the Pleistocene Era — that is to say, round about 2015 — a frequent criticism of Donald Trump was that he wasn’t ‘really’ a conservative. He was an ‘opportunist,’ you see, someone who blithely changed his position on exigent issues — abortion, government run health care, etc. — and even his political party to suit the prevailing winds of the zeitgeist.

There is something to that charge, but the more interesting question is whether it counts as a criticism or a commendation.

The poet William Blake was not exactly a political sage. But his observation that an honest man may change his opinions but not his principles is relevant here.

It was not until he became President, I believe, that Donald Trump began speaking about ‘principled realism.’

Whenever the President has laid out that idea, the punditocracy has been quick to criticize him. Following his UN speech this autumn, for example, Quartz dismissed the idea as an ‘oxymoron’ that was ‘baffling’ the foreign policy establishment.

Baffling it may be to the residents of Turtle Bay, Foggy Bottom, and their stable of K-Street plotters and scribes. But in fact, the President was admirably lucid in explaining what he meant by ‘principled realism.’ At the center of the idea is the resolute determination that ‘we will not be held hostage to old dogmas, discredited ideologies, and so-called experts who have been proven wrong over the years, time and time again.’ I’ve laid out what I think that means in the column linked above and in commentary on the President’s articulation of his national security policy a year ago.

The lodestar is pragmatism energized by tactical nimbleness. We want prosperity, national security, and the rule of law. What are the most likely routes to those goals?

It does not take a political genius to understand that weaponizing entities like the EPA, the IRS, and the whole lumbering apparatus of the administrative state is unlikely to attain those goals.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/12/17/federal-judge-finally-exposes-lies-heart-obamacare/

A federal judge in Texas has brought long-overdue clarity to our interminable debate over health care reform. On Friday, District Judge Reed O’Connor struck down Obamacare in its entirety, arguing that the individual mandate—the part of the law that forces American to buy insurance or pay a penalty—is unconstitutional. Because O’Connor ruled that the mandate can’t be separated from the rest of the health care law, he invalidated the whole thing.

It’s about time. No serious person has ever doubted that the individual mandate was unconstitutional, because no possible reading of the Commerce Clause could support such an outlandish scheme. As the late Justice Antonin Scalia noted during oral arguments before the Supreme Court in 2012, if the government can force you to buy health insurance under the Commerce Clause, it can also force you to buy broccoli, or a car, or pretty much anything. Allowing the individual mandate under the Commerce Clause powers would give Congress unlimited authority to regulate almost every aspect of our lives.

In his majority opinion for that case, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts declared rather straightforwardly that, “The Federal Government does not have the power to order people to buy health insurance.” But then Roberts did something not straightforward at all. He construed the penalty—the Orwellian-sounding “shared responsibility payment”—as merely a tax, and therefore permissible under the federal government’s taxing power. By this rather crude rhetorical legerdemain, Obamacare survived.

Of course, the individual mandate penalty was never a tax, and everyone knows it. When Congress passed last year’s tax bill, it set the penalty to zero, beginning next year. That one move exposed the cynical heart of Obamacare for what it is. If there is no penalty, and no revenue being brought in for the federal government, then the penalty isn’t a tax. And because the individual mandate violates Congress’ authority under the Commerce Clause, the mandate must be struck down, along with the rest of the law.
Obamacare Failed Because Young People Didn’t Want To Pay For It

All of this underscores the blunt reality that Obamacare was always at heart a bad-faith proposition. The basic operation of the law, never stated or acknowledged by its authors, was to force younger, healthier people to subsidize health insurance for older, sicker people. It was a redistribution scheme, plain and simple.

Perhaps that’s a sound policy, maybe even a morally upright one. But that was never what Obamacare defenders claimed the law to be. They said it was a “market-based” reform, that it would foster competition and lower prices, that you could keep your plan and your doctor, that the average family would save $2,500 a year.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/first-step-act-amendments-keep-violent-offenders-behind-bars/

Republicans can and should pass some common-sense amendments.

This week, the Senate will vote on the latest version of the First Step Act, a criminal-justice bill that would release thousands of dangerous criminals from federal prison earlier than under current law. This effort is misguided and dangerous, as I have written before. Thankfully, there is still time to limit the damage.

Along with Senator John Kennedy, I have introduced an amendment to categorically exclude violent felons and sex offenders from the bill’s time-credit program, which can be used for early release. We also have amendments to notify victims before a prisoner is released early, and to monitor whether prisoners who are released early commit more crimes. If advocates of First Step want to protect public safety, they will support all three amendments.

Advocates of this bill already have taken a first step to improve the bill, thanks to criticism from major law-enforcement groups, victims of crime, and conservatives such as myself. After calling my concerns “100 percent fake news” and trying to force their bill through the lame-duck Congress without vetting, these advocates have finally acknowledged some of the problems I have identified and taken steps to fix them. For example, the “warden loophole” has been tightened (though not entirely closed), several crimes have been added to the ineligible-prisoners list, and fentanyl traffickers are no longer eligible to earn time credits (though unfortunately, these traffickers would still benefit from reduced sentences on the front end). The bill’s “safety valve” provision was curtailed, so that judges will have less discretion to allow traffickers with serious criminal records to avoid mandatory minimum sentences required by law.

These modest changes have satisfied some of my conservative colleagues, who have signed on in support of the bill. Even this publication has offered a tentative, lukewarm endorsement. Both have said the bill should pass if it excludes violent offenders from early release.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272234/los-angeles-doubled-its-homeless-budget-doubled-daniel-greenfield

It wasn’t all that long ago that the nation watched transfixed in horror as fires tore apart California, destroying homes and claiming lives. In all the debates about global warming and forestry management, one singular cause of the fire was left unaddressed.

Global warming wasn’t starting the fires. People were.

Last December, the 422-acre Skirball Fire that forced the evacuation of 700 homes and took 10 days to put out was started by illegal cooking in a homeless encampment. The Leo Baeck Temple in Bel-Air, which celebrates “social justice”, even sued Los Angeles (both city and county) over fire damage for ignoring multiple complaints about the homeless encampment and the fire hazard that it posed.

This November, the Los Angeles Zoo had to evacuate its animals over a fire in yet another homeless encampment. That fire not only endangered lives, but diverted resources from fighting the much more serious fires in Ventura County.

But instead of shutting down the encampments, Mayor Garcetti, who has done more to legalize and subsidize homelessness in Los Angeles than any of his predecessors, sent “outreach workers” from the expanding behemoth of the LA Homeless Services Agency to ask them to please move.

That worked about as well as expected.

From Adam Andrzejewski
Did you know the Pentagon admitted to spending $1,220 on a single coffee cup?
Examples of government waste could fill every page in every newspaper across America. It’s a target-rich environment.
As our investigators dig deeper, the examples only grow more alarming.
$387 billion dollars wasted because of mistakes and improper medicare payments since 2004.
$50 billion dollars last year in end-of-year ‘use it or lose it’ spending.
$1 million dollars by NASA to prepare the nations religions for the discovery of extraterrestrial life.
$150,000 buying booze for embassies around the world.
$6,600 on fidget spinners. Yes… fidget spinners.
It’s time to end the insanity and demand fiscal accountability and transparency from our elected leaders.

That’s why we’ve launched a nationwide campaign urging the President to wage a War on Waste by posting White House expenditures online and cutting agency waste by 5%.
Americans deserve to know how their money is being spent. Together, let’s open the books and audit them. We need your help.

A generous donor is ready to match every donation made online before midnight of December 31st, up to $50,000.

Help us win the war on waste. Contribute today and double your impact: $25 becomes $50; $50 becomes $100.