RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/kavanaugh-confirmation-hearings-not-a-trial

Kavanaugh’s hearing has become a farce.

I’ve never thought the big Ford–Kavanaugh hearing scheduled for Thursday would actually happen. Maybe I’ll be proved wrong, but I’ve never believed Christine Blasey Ford wants to testify. This hearing is not going to settle the issue of what, if anything, happened 36 years ago — which, as I’ve noted, is why there is no point in having the hearing.

Senator Chuck Grassley, the Judiciary Committee chairman, should just invite affidavits from the witnesses and call it a day. Democrats, in any event, would rather have the specter of Ford’s testimony than the real thing, given that the latter will highlight: (a) her inability to recall and relate rudimentary details, (b) the fact that she did not utter a word about the alleged sexual assault for 30 years, (c) the discrepancies between her current version of events and the notes of what she told her therapist, and (d) the fact that the other witnesses she has identified do not corroborate her story. Moreover, now that Republicans have reportedly retained an experienced female litigator to conduct the questioning, there is no longer the prospect of video clips featuring Ford being grilled by old white guys — grist for what Democrats hoped would be their “War on Women 2.0” campaign ads.

Ford’s legal team continues to add new demands. The latest is a push to have two “trauma experts” and Ford’s polygrapher testify. The purpose of these outlandish proposals is likely to prompt denials that would allow Ford to bow out of the hearing, blaming purported GOP intransigence and insensitivity.

This underscores that the point of the hearing is being lost.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-consumer-confidence-rose-in-september-1537885594?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=0&cx_tag=pop&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Consumer confidence hit an 18-year high in September, a positive indicator for spending going into the holiday shopping season, as robust job growth and a strong economic outlook bolstered Americans’ expectations for the future.

The Conference Board, a private research group, said Tuesday its index of consumer confidence rose to 138.4, up from 134.7 in August—the highest level since September 2000, which represented the late stages of the 1990s technology boom. An index reading of 100 represents how households saw the economy in 1985.

The report came on the heels of a separate University of Michigan survey that said sentiment jumped in early September to the second-highest level since 2004—behind only the reading in March of this year.

Economists have voiced concerns about trade and tariffs as risks to economic growth over the next 12 months. For consumers, however, the issue isn’t registering.

“We are kind of in a little bit of a Goldilocks moment in the economy. I think things are really strong for the consumer,” said David Jaffe, chief executive of Ascena Retail Group Inc., during an earnings call this week. The company, one of the largest women’s clothing retailers with brands like Dressbarn and Ann Taylor, reported its first positive quarter of overall comparable-stores sales growth in more than three years Monday.

“The tariffs, while it’s not going to impact apparel very much, haven’t really hit yet. We’ve seen unemployment go down. What we’re seeing, I think, is maybe a little bit of a rebound due to a lack of shopping for apparel over the last couple of years,” Mr. Jaffe said.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sen-feinstein-clean-up-your-mess-1537915772?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=0&cx_tag=pop&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Republicans and others who live in California and are appalled by the Senate’s Brett Kavanaugh spectacle at least can do something about it. In November, they can hold their noses and pull the lever for Dianne Feinstein’s ultraliberal challenger and thereby send the state’s four-term Senate doyenne down to landslide defeat.

Mrs. Feinstein’s ending an otherwise a long and creditable career in humiliation and ignominy would be justice not only because of her culpable role in the Kavanaugh travesty. It would be poetic for her to finish under a real and recent cloud given actions that have cast a cloud over Judge Kavanaugh because of unprovable, last-minute claims about how he may have behaved in his teens.

Mrs. Feinstein could learn something from the New York Times in its own debunking of the latest ill-sourced Kavanaugh allegation, in which the paper says it contacted dozens of potential witnesses and found none who would verify a complaint floated Sunday in backhanded fashion by the New Yorker magazine.

Lesson: You don’t need the FBI. Private investigators are available. Opposition researchers can be hired—just not the Fusion GPS kind, who specialize in producing anonymous, unsubstantiated slurs rather than checking them out.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/09/25/anti-kavanaugh-mob-chases-sen-ted-cruz-wife-restaurant/

A mob of people calling themselves democratic socialists, LGBT activists, anarchists, anti-fascists, and anti-racists descended upon Sen. Ted Cruz and his wife while they were out to dinner last night. They chanted “We believe survivors,” surrounded the Cruzes, blocked their exit, and screamed in their faces, show videos of the altercation. Cruz can be heard saying “Let my wife through.”

The hecklers also shouted “[Cruz’s Senate opponent] Beto is way hotter than you, dude.” After the Cruzes exited through an side door, protesters can be heard shouting “Ted Cruz and Brett Kavanaugh are best friends!” and “Cancel Kavanaugh for women’s rights!”

“This is a message to Ted Cruz, Bret Kavanaugh, Donald Trump, and the rest of the racist, sexist, transphobic, and homophobic right-wing scum,” wrote Smash Racism DC in a statement taking responsibility for the harassment. “You are not safe. We will find you. We will expose you. We will take from you the peace you have taken from so many others.”

The incident appears to begin with a woman walking up to the Cruzes in the restaurant, calling herself a constituent and victim of sexual assault, and demanding to know how Cruz plans to vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. “Do you believe survivors, sir?” she demands, as her mob chants “We believe survivors” in the background.Democrats are charging, based purely on hazy and uncorroborated claims of alcohol-fueled sexual encounters nearly 40 years ago, that Kavanaugh is a vicious pervert. Cruz sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee that is slated to receive testimony Thursday from one woman making such accusations. But her legal team has already caused the testimony to be rescheduled six times. Such testimony would put Christine Blasey Ford under oath and liable to perjury charges.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/408250-rosenstein-guided-by-politics-not-a-pursuit-of-justice

The New York Times’s blockbuster report that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein broached the subject of seeking President Trump’s ouster cannot be separated from his appointment of a special counsel.

From the start of the Trump administration, politics has overwhelmed law enforcement. It was the political uproar stoked by the May 9, 2017, firing of FBI Director James Comey that induced Rosenstein to appoint a special counsel, Robert Mueller, to investigate President Trump. There was insufficient basis in law to do this. But that turned out to be of no more moment than the complete absence of any basis to remove the president under the 25th Amendment, the harebrained proposal the Times reports Rosenstein was floating at exactly the same time.

To be clear, the special counsel regulations require the existence of a factual basis for a criminal investigation — a crime — before a prosecutor is assigned. Moreover, a special counsel, who by regulation is recruited from outside the government, is not supposed to be assigned absent a Department of Justice (DOJ) conflict of interest so profound that the department is ethically barred from investigating the crime in question.

Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein could satisfy neither of these conditions. To this day, he has never specified a crime the president is suspected of committing. And there is no conflict; Mueller not only recruited prosecutors from the Justice Department, he has transitioned the two Russia indictments he’s brought to Justice Department components.

Both of these actions would be improper if there were an actual conflict. But, of course, there isn’t one because, again, Rosenstein has not specified a crime. It is the crime allegedly committed by a president that creates a conflict for the president’s Justice Department and calls for an outside prosecutor.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/kavanaugh-nomination-battle-like-orwells-1984/

Truth, due process, evidence, rights of the accused: All are swept aside in pursuit of the progressive agenda.

George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is no longer fiction. We are living it right now.

Google techies planned to massage Internet searches to emphasize correct thinking. A member of the so-called deep state, in an anonymous op-ed, brags that its “resistance” is undermining an elected president. The FBI, CIA, DOJ, and NSC were all weaponized in 2016 to ensure that the proper president would be elected — the choice adjudicated by properly progressive ideology. Wearing a wire is now redefined as simply flipping on an iPhone and recording your boss, boy- or girlfriend, or co-workers.

But never has the reality that we are living in a surreal age been clearer than during the strange cycles of Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

In Orwell’s world of 1984 Oceania, there is no longer a sense of due process, free inquiry, rules of evidence and cross examination, much less a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. Instead, regimented ideology — the supremacy of state power to control all aspects of one’s life to enforce a fossilized idea of mandated quality — warps everything from the use of language to private life.

Oceania’s Rules

Senator Diane Feinstein and the other Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee had long sought to destroy the Brett Kavanaugh nomination. Much of their paradoxical furor over his nomination arises from the boomeranging of their own past political blunders, such as when Democrats ended the filibuster on judicial nominations, in 2013. They also canonized the so-called 1992 Biden Rule, which holds that the Senate should not consider confirming the Supreme Court nomination of a lame-duck president (e.g., George H. W. Bush) in an election year.

http://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/senate-republicans-eye-monday-tuesday-floor-vote-kavanaugh

Senate Republican leaders want to schedule a floor vote for Monday or Tuesday on the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court “unless something derailed it along the way,” according to Senate Republican Conference Chairman John Thune of South Dakota.

Thune told reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday that if all goes according to plan, Republicans could get the procedural gears turning over the weekend. That assumes Thursday’s hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee featuring Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused him of sexual assault, does not alter the current trajectory that Senate GOP leaders have set.

When asked if that meant floor debate on Kavanaugh could take place Monday or Tuesday, he said, “I would think so, if things were to stay on schedule, unless something derailed it along the way.”

“Again, we’ll see what happens on Thursday. But at this point, if nothing changes, my assumption would be from a timing standpoint that we could begin that process Friday, Saturday timeframe and wrap it up next week sometime,” the Republican Conference chairman said

Under that timeline, a Judiciary Committee markup might take place Friday, allowing Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to file a cloture to cut off debate on the nominee as early as Saturday, which would set up a Monday vote to limit the debate on the Supreme Court nominee.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271415/castros-torture-american-pows-vietnam-jamie-glazov

Editors’ note: Last Friday, Sept. 21, 2018, our nation, led by our president, solemnly marked National POW/MIA Recognition Day, during which we honored all American prisoners of war and expressed our deep gratitude and respect for what they endured and — as empirical evidence suggests — in some cases may very well be continuing to endure. Indeed, we pay tribute to those who never returned — and, of course, also to their suffering families. In honor of this sacred day, Frontpage has deemed it important to run Jamie Glazov’s article, Castro’s Torture of American POWs in Vietnam from Breitbart’s Dec. 8, 2016 issue. We hope that our leadership and citizens will take serious action on this issue. We will always remember and we will never forget.

*
Castro’s Torture of American POWs in Vietnam.
By Jamie Glazov

The death of communist tyrant Fidel Castro has yielded much-deserved coverage of the monstrous nature of his tyrannical rule.

What has gone virtually unreported, however, is the direct and instrumental role Castro played in the torture and murder of American POWs in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. The story of Castro’s atrocities against American soldiers in this conflict is rarely ever told, least of all by our mainstream media.

During the Vietnam War, Castro sent a gang of his henchmen to run the “Cuban Program” at the Cu Loc POW camp in Hanoi, which became known as “the Zoo.” As Stuart Rochester and Frederick Kiley have documented in their book Honor Bound in a chapter entitled “The Zoo, 1967–1969: The Cuban Program and Other Atrocities,” one of the primary objectives of this “program” was to determine how much physical and psychological agony a human being could withstand.

Castro selected American POWs as his guinea pigs. A Cuban nicknamed “Fidel,” the main torturer at the Zoo, initiated his own personal reign of terror. He was described in documents based on POW debriefings as “a professional who was trained in psychology and prison control in Russia or Europe.”

Among Fidel’s torture techniques were beatings and whippings over every part of his victims’ bodies, without remission.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271417/stop-appeasing-democrats-bruce-thornton

From the playground to geopolitics, appeasing an aggressor invites only more aggression. This timeless truth of human nature is one that we moderns can’t seem to accept. We reflexively assume that a rational accommodation or concessions will be reciprocated by those proven to be ready to use any means necessary to achieve their aims, no matter how amoral, unfair, or vicious. Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court illustrate that this false assumption leads only to more demands, and ultimately to defeat.

The last-minute accusations from Christine Blasey Ford, a woman who claims that decades ago Kavanaugh groped her at a high school party, and Deborah Ramirez, who accused Kavanaugh of exposing himself to her at a frat party at Yale, are transparent acts of aggression against the judge and Republicans, one engineered by the Democrats.

Senator Dianne Feinstein sat for months on Ford’s letter and then––just as the Dems did in 1991with Anita Hill’s charges of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas’s during his hearings––released it only when Kavanaugh appeared to be heading for confirmation. Feinstein still hasn’t given the Judiciary Committee an unredacted copy of the letter. A few weeks after Ford went public, and after Kavanaugh said he had dairies from that summer detailing his whereabouts, The New Yorker published Ramirez’s account of a drunken party filled with obscene drinking games where he exposed himself to Ramirez.

Given that the Democrats had made public in advance their intention to derail the hearings and confirmation by any means possible, the timing of both sexual assault charges reeks of premeditated contrivance intended to delay confirmation as long as possible. But in the face of this naked ploy to bork Kavanaugh and derail the confirmation process for partisan advantage, the Republicans seem to be reverting to their customary preemptive cringe. All the Dems have to do is squeal “sexism” and Republicans start negotiating and offering concessions. Of course, after each concession comes another demand.

First the Dems demanded that Ford, a long-time Democrat activist, “be heard.” So last week the Chairman of Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley, granted another deadline extension for Ford to decide whether to testify before the Committee on Monday. Senator Dianne Feinstein calls these concessions “bullying deadlines.” As Feinstein put it, “Show some heart. Wait until Dr. Ford feels that she can come before the committee.” Ford doesn’t “feel” like she can testify on Monday because she’s afraid of flying, despite offers from the Committee to travel to her in California. Then she feared for her life because of death threats ––threats also made to Kavanaugh, his wife and two young daughters–– so she now demands enhanced security measures. The Committee caved and moved the date to Thursday.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-politics-of-destruction-1537831889

Say this for Deborah Ramirez. The second woman to accuse Brett Kavanaugh of committing sexual assault more than 30 years ago may not clearly recall what happened, but her story does clarify the ugly politics at play. Democrats are using the #MeToo movement as a weapon of political destruction to defeat a Supreme Court nominee and retake Congress.

Ms. Ramirez’s story, as recounted by Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker on Sunday, has more holes than even initial accuser Christine Blasey Ford’s. Unlike Ms. Ford, she does recall the place and year—a hall at Yale in their freshman year. Ms. Ramirez says that at a party Mr. Kavanaugh exposed himself and pushed his privates into her face, amid laughter from other men in the room, until she pushed him away.

Mr. Kavanaugh says the event “did not happen” and is “a smear, plain and simple.”
***

Even the sympathetic New Yorker writers concede that Ms. Ramirez was at first reluctant to talk about the incident. But after six days of “assessing her memories,” and after consulting with a Democratic lawyer, she felt confident enough to speak up. Even so, Ms. Ramirez concedes that she was drunk at the time to the point of being “on the floor, foggy and slurring her words.”

The reporters could not find a single other eyewitness who put Mr. Kavanaugh at the party. One of Ms. Ramirez’s confirming witnesses is an unidentified man who says he heard about it from someone else. Another classmate, Richard Oh, says he overheard a female student whose identity he can’t recall telling another student about such an incident at the time but with no reference to Mr. Kavanaugh.
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