RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/impeachment-over-porn-star-payoffs-is-just-a-liberal-fantasy/2018/08/30/809d75b8-ac68-11e8-8a0c-70b618c98d3c_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.08d997d01288

Michael Cohen’s decision to plead guilty for making hush-money payments on Donald Trump’s behalf has raised the prospect that if Democrats take control of Congress, they might try to impeach the president over a matter completely unrelated to a criminal conspiracy with Russia. Good luck with that: Even if Democrats win back both the House and Senate, there is zero chance a two-thirds majority of senators will convict President Trump for paying off an adult-film star.

It would be the height of hypocrisy if Democrats tried to remove the president over allegations of illegality relating to extramarital affairs. During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, congressional Democrats told us the private sexual conduct of a president does not matter, and that lying under oath to cover up a “consensual relationship” is not an impeachable offense. Then-Rep. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said President Bill Clinton’s lies about his sexual relationship with a White House intern might have been illegal, but declared the scandal “a tawdry but not impeachable affair” — right before heading off to a fundraiser with Clinton. At the time, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) declared that the Starr investigation “vindicates President Clinton in the conduct of his public life because we’re only left with this personal stuff” and that Founding Fathers “would say it was not for the investigation of a president’s personal life that we risked our life, our liberty, and our sacred honor.”

But now that a Republican president is accused of covering up an affair, suddenly Democrats are channeling their inner Kenneth W. Starr.

Today, Democrats are outraged and appalled when Trump attacks special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and calls his inquiry a “witch hunt.” But back then, then-Sen. Joe Biden called the Starr investigation . . . wait for it . . . a “witch hunt.” Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) declared Starr was “out of control” and accused him of having a “fixation of trying to topple the president of the United States.” Rahm Emanuel, then a White House senior adviser, accused Starr of engaging in “a partisan political pursuit of the president” while White House special counsel Lanny Davis (who is now representing Cohen) said Starr was a “desperate prosecutor who can’t make a case on Whitewater” and who should face “possible removal because of his conduct.”

https://pjmedia.com/video/vicious-anti-trump-diatribes-mar-aretha-franklins-memorial-service-orange-apparition-leech/

Continuing a sickening Democratic tradition of politicizing public memorial services.

The late great Aretha Franklin demanded R-E-S-P-E-C-T, but that didn’t stop at least a couple of speakers at her funeral service in Detroit on Friday from trivializing her memory.

Democrats Michael Eric Dyson and Al Sharpton both took the opportunity to blast President Trump during their eulogies, continuing a sickening Democratic tradition of politicizing public memorial services.

Former presidents and preachers and legendary singers took to the stage at Greater Grace Temple to pay their respects to the Queen of Soul during the farewell extravaganza.

Marring the event, was the hateful and partisan tone taken by Dyson and Sharpton, who whipped the mourning crowd into a frenzy at every mention of Trump.

Dyson lauded Aretha Franklin for being socially conscious and politically active throughout her life — before viciously laying into the president.

“Then this orange apparition had the nerve to say she worked for him! You lugubrious leech!” he bellowed, apparently meaning that President Trump is a sad and mournful bloodsucker. “You dopey doppelganger of deceit and deviancy!” he continued, sticking with the alliteration theme. “You lethal liar, you dimwitted dictator! You foolish fascist!!!”

His use of the word “fascist” brought many in the cheering crowd to their feet.

“She didn’t work for you! She worked above you!” he howled angrily. “She worked beyond you! Get your preposition right! CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-to-sign-executive-order-on-retirement-savings-1535673624?mod=trending_now_1

President Trump signed an executive order Friday directing the government to review rules requiring retirees to start taking annual withdrawals from retirement funds after they turn 70 ½ and to consider making it easier for small businesses to offer employees 401(k) plans.

The action, signed during a ceremony in Charlotte, N.C., ahead of the Labor Day weekend, was billed by the White House as a push to better prepare workers for retirement.

As part of the initiative, the Treasury Department would review the rules on required minimum distributions from retirement plans to see if investors can keep more money for a longer time in 401(k)s, individual retirement accounts and other tax-sheltered savings plans. If successful, it could allow retirees to spread retirement savings over a longer period.

The executive order also would direct the Treasury and Labor departments to consider issuing regulations that could make it easier and cheaper for smaller employers to band together to offer 401(k)-type plans for their workers.

“Such a big thing—they’ll be banding together,” Mr. Trump told an auditorium of supporters in Charlotte. “Small businesses will be able to pool their resources so that they can have the same purchasing power or even more, frankly, as large businesses.”

The arrangement has been available, but only to employers with an affiliation or connection, such as members of the same industry trade association.

“We will try to find policy ideas that will make joining a 401(k) plan a more attractive proposition for small employers to the ultimate benefit of their employees,” said Preston Rutledge, assistant secretary of labor for the Employee Benefits Security Administration.

Dan Kowalski, counselor to the secretary of the Treasury, said the initiative aims to make multiemployer plans more understandable and useful for employees and less costly and burdensome for employers. It will also look to modernize the life-expectancy tables that are used to determine required minimum distributions. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/anatomy-of-a-fusion-smear-1535757026

Cleta Mitchell is a top campaign-finance lawyer in Washington, D.C. This year she’s also been the target of a political and media smear that reveals some of the nastiness at work in the allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

A partner at Foley & Lardner, Ms. Mitchell was astonished to find herself dragged into the Russia investigation on March 13 when Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee issued an interim report. They wrote that they still wanted to interview “key witnesses,” including Ms. Mitchell, who they claimed was “involved in or may have knowledge of third-party political outreach from the Kremlin to the Trump campaign, including persons linked to the National Rifle Association (NRA).”

Two days later the McClatchy news service published a story with the headline “NRA lawyer expressed concerns about group’s Russia ties, investigators told.” The story cited two anonymous sources claiming Congress was investigating Ms. Mitchell’s worries that the NRA had been “channeling Russia funds into the 2016 elections to help Donald Trump.”

Ms. Mitchell says none of this is true. She hadn’t done legal work for the NRA in at least a decade, had zero contact with it in 2016, and had spoken to no one about its actions. She says she told this to McClatchy, which published the story anyway.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/beto-orourke-tried-to-flee-scene-drunk-driving-crash/

It has long been a matter of public record that Beto O’Rourke was arrested for driving while intoxicated in 1998, but a police report recently obtained by the Houston Chronicle reveals that the Democratic Senate candidate crashed and tried to flee the scene before his arrest.

O’Rourke, then 26, was driving at “a high rate of speed” on a Texas highway roughly ten miles from the New Mexico border when he crashed into a truck and spun across the median into oncoming traffic. A witness whom O’Rourke passed shortly before crashing later told police he personally prevented O’Rourke from fleeing the scene. The unnamed witness “turned on his overhead lights to warn oncoming traffic and to try to get the defendant [O’Rourke] to stop,” according to the report.

The rising progressive star, who blew a 0.136 and a 0.134 on police breathalyzers, did not address the witness report that he tried to flee the scene in a statement released on Thursday.

“I drove drunk and was arrested for a DWI in 1998,” O’Rourke said. “As I’ve publicly discussed over the last 20 years, I made a serious mistake for which there is no excuse.”

Republican senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who is engaged in a tight race with O’Rourke, has not commented on the newly revealed details of his opponent’s arrest.

O’Rourke, the son of an El Paso County judge, was charged with driving while intoxicated following the incident but completed a court-ordered diversion program to ensure that the charges would be dismissed.

The DWI arrest was not O’Rourke’s only youthful run-in with law enforcement: He was also arrested for trespassing after hopping a fence at a University of Texas at El Paso facility.

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/21553/countdown-to-civil-war
http://goudsmit.pundicity.com
http://lindagoudsmit.com

On January 26, 2018 Daniel Greenfield gave a brilliant speech in South Carolina in which he argued that politics make civil wars – not guns. “Guns are how a civil war ends. Politics is how it begins.” What does that mean?

“Two or more sides disagree on who runs the country. And they can’t settle the question through elections because they don’t even agree that elections are how you decide who’s in charge. That’s the basic issue here. Who decides who runs the country? When you hate each other but accept the election results, you have a country. When you stop accepting election results, you have a countdown to a civil war.”

This is no small thing. The United States of America has distinguished itself by the peaceful transfer of power through elections for 242 years. Opposing parties compete in an election – one side wins and the other loses. The country reunites after the election in support of the office of the President and competes again four years later.

In 2016 Hillary Clinton competed against Donald Trump for the presidency and lost. For the first time in American history, 22 months after a presidential election the losing party still refuses to accept the election outcome. We are in a countdown to civil war. What changed?

The losing party of leftist Democrats began believing their own narrative of political correctness, moral relativism, and historical revisionism. They live in the world of subjective reality where facts do not get in their way. Let me explain.

Subjective reality is a dreamscape where saying is the same as doing, all ideas are equal, and trying is the same as achieving. In the surreal world of subjective reality FEELINGS are the determining value. So, if you feel like Hillary should have won then in your mind she did win. If you feel that Donald Trump should not have won then he didn’t win – he is not your president.

In the objective world of FACTS Donald Trump won the election and is now the 45th president of the United States. He is President Donald Trump and is America’s president whether you like him or don’t like him, whether you agree with him or don’t agree with him, and whether you voted for him or didn’t vote for him. That is what it means to accept an election outcome – you accept the fact of it no matter how you feel about it.

As Tiger Woods so concisely pointed out, “He’s the president of the United States and you have to respect the office,” Tiger said. “No matter who’s in the office, you may like, dislike the personality or the politics, but we all must respect the office.”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/bruce-ohr-kept-muellers-pit-bull-andrew-weissmann-in-the-loop-on-dirty-dossier-in-2016/

Justice Department official Bruce Ohr kept Andrew Weissmann — also known a special counsel Robert Mueller’s “pit bull” — informed about the anti-Trump dossier before and after the 2016 election, Fox News’ Catherine Herridge reported on Thursday.

Besides Weissmann, according to Herridge’s two sources, Ohr also collaborated with former FBI agent Peter Strzok, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, former deputy director Andrew McCabe, at least one other DOJ official, and a current FBI agent who worked with Strzok on the Russia case.

Ironically, one of the sources said Weissmann was kept “in the loop” on the fraudulent dossier while he was head of the criminal fraud division. Mueller went on to assign him to his special counsel team of “13 angry Democrats” (as President Trump calls them).

Weissman is a Democrat partisan who attended Hillary Clinton’s election night party and thanked then-acting attorney general Sally Yates in January 2017 after she defied President Trump’s travel ban order. Known to be an unscrupulous attorney who uses intimidating, hardball tactics, Weissmann has had several high-profile rulings overturned — but only after livelihoods were destroyed.

Former federal prosecutor Joe diGenova referred to Weissmann as a “Jack the Ripper-like” fiend in a recent segment on Fox News. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-transgender-language-war-1535582272

If you want to control people’s thoughts, begin by commandeering their words. Taking this Orwellian lesson to heart, Virginia’s Fairfax County public school system recently stripped the phrase “biological gender” from its family life curriculum, replacing it with “sex assigned at birth.”

Without permitting parents to opt out, public schools across the country are teaching children that “gender” is neither binary nor biological. It’s closer to a mental state: a question of how girllike or boylike you feel. Students will fall anywhere along a gender spectrum, according to these educators.

So how girllike does any girl feel? The answer might reasonably be expected to vary throughout adolescence, depending on whether a girl was just dumped by a boy or tripped in the hall. Mishaps that once only compromised one’s pride now threaten a child’s gender identity, the ever-evolving claim to a “girl card.” As if adolescence weren’t already hard enough.

This is the left’s allegedly defensive battle, waged on behalf of an aggrieved microminority even as it sets its sights on broader ideological territory. Consider recent state and local actions punishing those who decline to use an individual’s pronouns of choice. California Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation last year threatening jail time for health-care professionals who “willfully and repeatedly” refuse to use a patient’s preferred pronouns. Under guidelines issued in 2015 by New York City’s Commission on Human Rights, employers, landlords and business owners who intentionally use the wrong pronoun with transgender workers and tenants face potential fines of as much as $250,000.

Typically, in America, when groups disagree, we leave them to employ the vocabularies that reflect their values. My “affirmative action” is your “racial preferences.” One person’s “fetus” is another’s “baby boy.” This is as it should be; an entire worldview is packed into the word “fetus.” Another is contained in the reference to one person as “them” or “they.” For those with a religious conviction that sex is both biological and binary, God’s purposeful creation, denial of this involves sacrilege no less than bowing to idols in the town square. When the state compels such denial among religious people, it clobbers the Constitution’s guarantee of free exercise of religion, lending government power to a contemporary variant on forced conversion.

But individuals need not be religious to believe that one person can never be a “they”; compelled speech is no less unconstitutional for those who refuse an utterance based on a different viewpoint, as the Supreme Court held in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943). Upholding students’ right to refuse to salute an American flag even on nonreligious grounds, Justice Robert H. Jackson declared: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, religion or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” This is precisely what forced reference to someone else as “ze,” “sie,” “hir,” “co,” “ev,” “xe,” “thon” or “they” entails. When the state employs coercive power to compel an utterance, what might otherwise be a courtesy quickly becomes a plank walk. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/30/thank-

It was only a week ago that Democrats, journalists, and NeverTrump Republicans were (again) calling for the impeachment of the president. But this time, they were certain the end was near.

Following the plea agreement between Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, and federal prosecutors for campaign finance violations tied to payoffs in 2016 to Trump’s alleged lovers, this tiresome anti-Trump cabal insisted the Cohen fiasco would finally spell the doom they’ve been counting on since Trump took office. A New York Times columnist claimed Trump was “credibly alleged to have purposefully conspired with Cohen to commit criminal acts,” and that the conduct met the constitutional threshold of “high crimes and misdemeanors” for which the president should be removed from office. Legal fossils from the Watergate era arose from the political dead to offer up bogus comparisons between the two crises. Reporters claimed the White House was in chaos and accused the president of “lashing out” after the double-whammy of the Cohen deal and the guilty verdict in the trial of his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort.

Things looked grim. Even longtime defenders of the president were gobsmacked about how to mitigate the damage as the political pile-on continued.

Then along came Lanny Davis.

For a brief moment, a divided nation shouted in unison as Davis’s familiar face appeared on television: “Oh, dear God, not this guy!” Between Davis and the reemergence of Rudy Giuliani as Trump’s latest attorney, we thought we would be forced to party like it’s 1999.

Cohen hired the longtime Clinton family fixer to make his case to the public and portray the president’s lawyer as yet another victim of Trump’s skullduggery. The plotline of one shady presidential lawyer hiring another shady presidential lawyer was too enticing for the media to ignore; Davis was eagerly booked on morning shows and cable news programs to tell the porn-star silencer’s tale of woe. (In one interview, Davis solemnly lamented about “the pain [Cohen] went through for his family,” and later alluded to a popular political trope about Cohen being separated from his family when he goes to prison.)

For this week’s Big Ideas with Ben Weingarten podcast, I had Sean Bigley, a national security attorney who prosecutes intelligence community whistleblower retaliation cases — and is representing Pentagon whistleblower Adam Lovinger in his chilling case that has garnered national attention amazingly involving both a Clinton confidante and Stefan Halper — on the podcast to discuss among other things:

The historical politicization and weaponization of national security clearances
How the politicization and weaponization of national security clearances by holdovers meant to block President Trump’s nominees and appointees from coming into the administration is an entirely new pernicious tactic
The remarkable story of how the highly rated 12-plus year Pentagon analyst Adam Lovinger has had his career destroyed after blowing the whistle on malfeasance within the Department of Defense’s in-house think-tank, the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), including: