RUTHFULLY YOURS

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:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271180/smoking-gun-memo-laid-out-lefts-assault-matthew-vadum

A strategy memo compiled by George Soros-funded activist groups as President Trump was being inaugurated last year foretold and seemed to lay the groundwork for many of the political difficulties Trump now faces and the politics-related strife now roiling the nation.

The memo takes on a heightened importance as the politically-driven censorship of conservatives by the gigantic, unregulated social media corporations controlled by the Left is moving into high gear while the crucial midterm congressional elections of Nov. 6 approach.

The intensely anti-conservative animus in the memo may have inspired MasterCard and WorldPay’s attempt on Aug. 21 to strangle the fundraising efforts of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, publisher of FrontPage, by refusing to complete its financial transactions. On that day MasterCard informed the Freedom Center that it would no longer process its transactions because it had been labeled a “hate group” by the radical leftist groups known as the Southern Poverty Law Center and ColorOfChange.org. The Freedom Center stood falsely accused of being “hateful in nature” and “advocating for violence.”

Only a massive outcry by conservative groups and prominent conservatives like Rush Limbaugh forced MasterCard to back down days later and restore the Freedom Center’s online fundraising facilities. But other conservative websites haven’t been so lucky. Many have been shut down or seen their traffic slashed as leftists have manipulated algorithms and limited the reach of conservative content.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/30/the-truth

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was star-crossed from the start. His friend and successor as FBI director, James Comey, by his own admission prompted the investigation—with the deliberate leaking of classified memos about his conversations with President Donald Trump to the press.

Mueller then unnecessarily stocked his team with what the press called his “dream team” of mostly Democratic partisans. One had defended a Hillary Clinton employee. Another had defended the Clinton Foundation.

Mueller at first did not announce to the press why he had dismissed Trump-hating FBI operatives Lisa Page and Peter Strzok from his investigative team. Instead, he staggered their departures to leave the impression they were routine reassignments.

But Mueller’s greatest problem was his original mandate to discover whether Trump colluded with the Russians in 2016 to tilt the election in his favor.

After 15 months, Mueller has indicted a number of Trump associates, but on charges having nothing to do with Russian collusion. They faced inordinately long prison sentences unless they “flipped” and testified against Trump.

We are left with the impression that Mueller cannot find much to do with his original mandate of unearthing Russian collusion, but he still thinks Trump is guilty of something.

In other words, Mueller has reversed the proper order of jurisprudence.

https://nypost.com/2018/08/28/these-are-the-real-scandals-plaguing-our-country/

Not so long ago, editors and reporters dreaded the dog days of August because news took a vacation. Now the news never stops.

The challenge today is to make sense of the gusher of apocalyptic-sounding eruptions, claims and predictions. Here’s my view of what’s happening to our country.

America is being scandalized by four enormous events that are happening simultaneously. By scandalized, I mean that people are shocked and outraged at what they regard as breaches of acceptable behavior or morality.

That wouldn’t be a problem if the vast majority were scandalized by the same things. That’s not the America we have. The vicious polarization stems from the fact that the country is split almost exactly in half over what people are outraged about.

The first scandalizing event is Donald Trump — his candidacy, his election and his presidency. And, on some days to some people, his existence.

They have a point — up to a point. Trump is unlike any president in history, taking the Oval Office after a notorious business career and personal life. And it’s not as if he folded into the mold once he got elected, though his policies are more conventional that his personality.

http://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/404073-lanny-davis-is-more-proof-2018-is-year-of-lawyers-living-dangerously

For lawyers, it has been a year of living dangerously. The scandals swirling around Washington have left a pile of attorneys accused of false statements, leaks or other improper conduct. The latest casualty appears to be Lanny Davis, who just admitted to not only spreading a false story but then lying about being its source.

Only recently, Davis — a Democratic stalwart who has been a close adviser to the Clintons — announced that he would represent President Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, free of charge. Davis has steered Cohen into a 180-degree turn from Trump loyalist to chief accuser. He suggested that Cohen could implicate Trump in crimes touching on obstruction, collusion and campaign-finance violations. He caused a firestorm nationally when he suggested Trump knew in advance about Russian hacking of Clinton campaign and Democratic Party emails and also approved the infamous meeting with Russian representatives in Trump Tower.

At the same time, Davis attacked Trump and his counsel as liars, proclaiming that his defense of Cohen is powerfully simple — “it’s about truth, and the power of the truth is what Michael Cohen now has no matter what … Mayor (Rudy) Giuliani invents for a president who’s been known to lie.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271142/deep-state-winning-bruce-thornton

By any reasonable standard, the presidency of Donald Trump has so far been a success. After eight years of Barack Obama’s sluggish recovery from the 2008 Great Recession, the economy is “blistering,” as MarketWatch put it, its vigorous growth creating jobs, raising incomes, and lifting the market’s “animal spirits.” Abroad, the “kick me” sign Obama and the progressives hung on America’s back is gone, with allies, rivals, and enemies alike now taking us seriously as the indispensable world power to treat with respect, rather than a daft rich uncle to bully and fleece.

Yet despite all these reasons for feeling good about the country’s getting its mojo back, the current mood is one of crisis and hysteria. We’re consumed by a special counsel’s show trials of marginal Trump associates whose actions had no material impact on the election or the public weal. Appointed to investigate “collusion” with Russia and foreign interference in our election, all that the two-bit Javert Robert Mueller can come up with are paltry financial crimes and duplicitous perjury traps. Consequential developments abroad, such as Turkey’s implosion and a war brewing on Israel’s northern border, are ignored so we can pick over the carcasses of a couple of bottom-feeding swamp-fixers like Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen.

This lack of seriousness and failure to recognize this government’s successes have many reasons. Partly it’s a consequence of just how good we have it. Like most of our political dysfunctions, we are so rich and comfortable that we think we can afford to obsess over payoffs to porn stars and Playboy bunnies, and ignore more important issues. Our attention is hostage to a 24/7 virtual carnival and freak-show on social media, cable news, and the internet. We’re in the third generation of a failed educational system that exists not to teach basic skills, cultural knowledge, and critical reasoning, but to create the new Progressive Man who mouths social justice pieties as he keeps up with the latest fads and fashion. We live in a world of noisy, kinetic distractions, like mice in a maze scurrying to snatch the latest bit of cheese from Apple, Facebook, YouTube, and Hollywood.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/yahoo-admits-it-scans-emails-to-collect-data-to-sell-to-advertisers/

While the tech companies harvest our data to sell ads, in recent years email services have been off limits. That limit has just been crossed with the disclosure that Verizon is now promoting a new service to advertisers where they continually scan the 200 million inboxes of Yahoo Mail users. Yahoo Mail is a part of Yahoo that Verizon recently acquired under their Oath brand. Oath/Verizon told advertisers that they search the mail for clues about what people might buy or be interested in buying. They are doing the same with AOL Mail, which Verizon also owns.

Among all of the U.S. email providers, these are the only mail services being exposed to this intrusion. In the past, Gmail also scanned users’ emails but terminated that practice last year. Of course, Google has many other ways to gather our personal data. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/toxic_antibiotics.html

Urinary tract infections affect millions of women, and often they are prescribed Ciprofloxacin (Cipro), Gemifoxacin (Factive), Levofloxacin (Levaquin), Moxifloxacin (Avelox), Norfloxacin (Noroxin), or Ofloxacin (Floxin). These are fluoroquinolones, antibiotics, and have been on the market for more than 30 years. They are also routinely prescribed for a range of infections – sinusitis, cystitis, prostatitis, bronchitis, and skin infections.

For some people, what is supposed to be a helpful medicine has turned into a medical nightmare, and many are still unaware of the dangers posed by these antibiotics.

Fluroquinolones, when used as tablets, capsules, or injectables, are associated with disabling and potentially permanent serious side-effects that can occur together.

The concerns about the antibiotic fluoroquinolone drugs are not new. In fact:

The FDA first added a Boxed Warning to fluoroquinolones in July 2008 for the increased risk of tendinitis and tendon rupture. In February 2011, the risk of worsening symptoms for those with myasthenia gravis was added to the Boxed Warning. In August 2013, the agency required updates to the labeling to describe the potential for irreversible peripheral neuropathy or serious nerve damage.

Then, on May 12, 2016, the FDA warned that fluoroquinolone antibiotics (emphasis added):

… are associated with disabling and potentially permanent side effects of the tendons, muscles, joints, nerves, and central nervous system that can occur together in the same patient. …