RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270355/guns-and-past-vs-present-americans-walter-williams

Having enjoyed my 82nd birthday, I am part of a group of about 50 million Americans who are 65 years of age or older. Those who are 90 or older were in school during the 1930s. My age cohort was in school during the 1940s. Baby boomers approaching their 70s were in school during the 1950s and early ’60s.

Try this question to any one of those 50 million Americans who are 65 or older: Do you recall any discussions about the need to hire armed guards to protect students and teachers against school shootings? Do you remember school policemen patrolling the hallways? How many students were shot to death during the time you were in school? For me and those other Americans 65 or older, when we were in school, a conversation about hiring armed guards and having police patrol hallways would have been seen as lunacy. There was no reason.

What’s the difference between yesteryear and today? The logic of the argument for those calling for stricter gun control laws, in the wake of recent school shootings, is that something has happened to guns. Guns have behaved more poorly and become evil. Guns themselves are the problem. The job for those of us who are 65 or older is to relay the fact that guns were more available and less controlled in years past, when there was far less mayhem. Something else is the problem.

Guns haven’t changed. People have changed. Behavior that is accepted from today’s young people was not accepted yesteryear. For those of us who are 65 or older, assaults on teachers were not routine as they are in some cities. For example, in Baltimore, an average of four teachers and staff members were assaulted each school day in 2010, and more than 300 school staff members filed workers’ compensation claims in a year because of injuries received through assaults or altercations on the job. In Philadelphia, 690 teachers were assaulted in 2010, and in a five-year period, 4,000 were. In that city’s schools, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer, “on an average day 25 students, teachers, or other staff members were beaten, robbed, sexually assaulted, or victims of other violent crimes. That doesn’t even include thousands more who are extorted, threatened, or bullied in a school year.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/270351/supreme-courts-masterpiece-evasion-daniel-greenfield

The Supreme Court’s Masterpiece Cakeshop decision was less of a ruling on the First Amendment than on the left’s growing hostility to the First Amendment. The decision isn’t truly meaningful. And it doesn’t make anyone happy.

Except the owner of the cake shop.

Instead the Supreme Court found a fairly broad consensus, not around the protection of the First Amendment, but the importance of the First Amendment. In many ways this was more of a cultural warning than a legal decision. It cautions leftist activists in government that they ought to respect Freedom of Religion. Even if they undermine it.

There were plenty of weaknesses on the Colorado side. Which meant that it was one of the best shots for protecting Freedom of Religion. Instead a faint victory for the idea, but not necessarily the substance, was won in a narrow decision.

We haven’t the last of these battles yet. And future cases are likely to avoid the biased behavior and legal complications of the Colorado case.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/new_jersey_and_gun_control.html

The gun control conundrum will continue ad infinitum. But what is happening in New Jersey should frighten anyone — gun owner or not. NJS102 will most likely be affirmed by the Democrat senate majority in the NJ legislature. The NJ Assembly has already passed the following:

A1217, which would create restraining orders in the state allowing family members and others to ask a judge to have a person’s guns seized and ban them from buying weapons for up to a year.
A2757, which would require all private gun sales in the state to go through a licensed dealer who can perform an additional background check at the point of sale.
A2759, which would create an outright ban in the state on possessing armor-piercing bullets.
A2761, which would ban magazines in the state that hold more than 10 rounds, with some exceptions.

How will this affect gun owners? The proposed legislation states that

No person shall be convicted of an offense… for possessing any firearms, weapons, destructive devices, large capacity ammunition magazines, silencers or explosives, if after giving written notice of his intention to do so, including the proposed date and time of surrender, he voluntarily surrendered [emphasis mine] the weapon, device, instrument or substance in question to the superintendent or to the chief of police in the municipality in which he resides, provided that the required notice is received by the superintendent or chief of police before any charges have been made or complaints filed [.]

Furthermore, a firearm with a fixed magazine capacity holding up to 15 rounds which is incapable of being modified to accommodate 10 or less rounds is to be registered. If not, the firearms owner “must complete a registration statement to be prescribed by the Superintendent of the State Police, and produce for inspection a valid firearms purchaser identification card, permit to carry a handgun, or permit to purchase a handgun.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/trump-lawyers-mueller-letter-two-things-right/

“In short, unless there is a smoking gun against the president that is lurking unseen even in the private jousting between Trump’s team and Mueller, the special prosecutor should be wrapping up the obstruction aspect of his probe rather than extending it via a court fight over the president’s testimony.”

We learned more about the back-and-forth between President Trump’s legal team and Special Counsel Robert Mueller this past weekend. The New York Times published a long letter from Trump’s team to Mueller arguing that he should drop his request to interview the president.

The lengthy letter makes many factual and legal assertions, some of which are highly debatable. Yet, assuming that it accurately reflects the nature and scope of Mueller’s investigation, its two bottom-line claims have merit: The special counsel does not have a viable criminal case against the president, nor has he justified the extraordinary measure of seeking the president’s testimony.

The letter suggests that the special counsel’s inquiry into Trump’s conduct is focused on obstruction. Mueller was appointed on May 17, 2017, amid the uproar over two events: Trump’s May 9 firing of Comey, and Comey’s subsequent leak of a memo-to-self (published by the Times on May 16), which claimed that Trump had pressured him to drop any investigation of former national-security adviser Michael Flynn. The letter implies that these two events remain the gravamen of the special counsel’s obstruction probe. If that is so, there is no obstruction case.

Only illegal acts to influence an investigation can predicate a criminal charge of obstruction against a president. Investigation and prosecution are executive functions in our system. FBI investigations are conducted under the president’s power; unlike ordinary citizens, the chief executive has the authority to influence, impede, and even shut down investigations.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/can-a-president-pardon-himself-yes-trump-can/But he shouldn’t be talking about it.

As he often does, President Trump hijacked the news cycle with a Monday-morning tweet, this one observing that “numerous legal scholars” agree that “I have the absolute right to PARDON myself.” The president elaborates that he has done nothing wrong, and thus there is nothing to pardon.

So, one might ask, why bring it up?

It’s a good question, and not for the first time are we asking. Late last July, Trump tweeted that “all agree the U.S. President has the complete power to pardon” — only to add that there was no point discussing pardons because the only crimes arising out of the Russia probe were leaks of classified information to hurt the administration, not misconduct by the administration. On that occasion, the president was obviously reacting to a Washington Post report that he had been asking advisers “about his power to pardon aides, family members and even himself.”

In any event, if we must discuss the matter then, yes, the Constitution empowers the president to pardon himself. Like any other power, the pardon power may be abused, and if Congress finds a presidential self-pardon is sufficiently abusive, it may impeach and remove the president. But that would not vitiate the pardon — it would be impossible to prosecute the president on whatever crimes had been pardoned.

I wrote a column for PJ Media last year when the president raised the subject. Here’s the pertinent part:

The pardon question is factually premature in the sense that there is no allegation or indication that [the president] or those close to him have committed a crime. It is not, however, legally premature. There need not be a formal criminal charge before a president issues a pardon. After President Nixon resigned, President Ford pardoned him even though he had not been indicted. President Lincoln mass-pardoned Confederate soldiers and sympathizers, and President Carter mass-pardoned Vietnam draft evaders. Thus, the fact that special counsel Mueller has not, and may never, file criminal charges would not prevent President Trump from issuing pardons.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-obama-and-the-jobs-report-1528137323

The outrage over President Trump’s Friday jobs tweet may be fake, but there’s a real issue here over the way our government should communicate.

Here’s the story: On Friday, more than an hour before the release of the Department of Labor’s monthly jobs report, the President tweeted, “Looking forward to seeing the employment numbers at 8:30 this morning.”

The report turned out to include plenty of good news—more job creation than expected and an encouraging increase in wages, particularly for those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. But the President’s vague early tweet sparked an intense reaction from former aides to his predecessor and from many members of the press corps.

“Trump Touts Jobs Report Before Official Release, Breaking Protocol,” announced a New York Times headline on Friday. It was just one of many reports focusing on the President’s early tweet.

President Trump “has proven he cannot be trusted with the information,” proclaimed former Obama White House aide Aaron Sojourner.

Jason Furman, who served as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during President Obama’s second term, addresses the issue with an op-ed in the Journal:

If—69 minutes before the numbers were set to be released—President Obama had signaled via Twitter that they were going to be great, I’d have been shocked.

A president who signals advance news about economic data invites concern that he also is bragging about the good news privately, which could result in the information’s exploitation for enormous private gain by some well-connected investor.

The handling of such data certainly requires great care. But it’s not clear just how shocking such an event would have been during Mr. Obama’s second term. Mr. Furman has raised—without evidence—the possibility that Mr. Trump might privately share non-public jobs data. What about Mr. Obama?

The Journal reported on Friday:

While disclosures of economic data are rare, they aren’t unprecedented. In February 2009, with the U.S. economy in crisis and Congress debating a stimulus package, then-Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) heard from Mr. Obama around midnight that the following morning’s jobs report numbers “would be somewhat scary,” he told the Senate after the report’s release. The Labor Department reported a loss of 598,000 jobs in January. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-04/u-s-supreme-court-throws-out-gay-bias-finding-against-baker-ji0cf2pg

The U.S. Supreme Court left unresolved questions about the competing rights of business owners and gay customers as the justices issued a narrow ruling Monday favoring a Colorado baker who wouldn’t make a cake to celebrate a same-sex wedding.

Voting 7-2, the court tossed out a Colorado Civil Rights Commission finding that the baker had violated a state civil-rights law. The high court said the decision was tainted by anti-religious bias, pointing to one commissioner’s comments that religion had been used to justify slavery and the Holocaust.

“The commission’s hostility was inconsistent with the First Amendment’s guarantee that our laws be applied in a manner that is neutral toward religion,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court.

But Kennedy also said the court wasn’t deciding whether other business owners have a right to refuse to take part in gay weddings, saying those issues “must await further elaboration in the courts.”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/breaking-supreme-court-rules-in-favor-of-colorado-baker-in-gay-wedding-cake-case/

On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in favor of Colorado baker Jack Phillips, who was sanctioned for refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding.

Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, was told by a Colorado Civil Rights Commission that he cannot refuse to bake cakes for events that violate his conscience, even though he had a long history of selling items in his cakeshop to anyone who walked through the door. Phillips, citing his Christian faith, said his conscience would not allow him to design cakes for events like divorce parties, lewd bachelor parties, or same-sex weddings.

Colorado ordered him to either make cakes for same-sex weddings or stop making cakes at all.

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that “The laws and the Constitution can, and in some instances must, protect gay persons and gay couples in the exercise of their civil rights, but religious and philosophical objections to gay marriage are protected views and in some instances protected forms of expression.” Citing Obergefell v. Hodges, the justices wrote that the Commission’s treatment of Phillips’ case:

…showed elements of a clear and impermissible hostility toward the sincere religious beliefs motivating his objection. As the record shows, some of the commissioners at the Commission’s formal, public hearings endorsed the view that religious beliefs cannot legitimately be carried into the public sphere or commercial domain, disparaged Phillips’ faith as despicable and characterized it as merely rhetorical, and compared his invocation of his sincerely held religious beliefs to defenses of slavery and the Holocaust. No commissioners objected to the comments. Nor were they mentioned in the later state-court ruling or disavowed in the briefs filed here. The comments thus cast doubt on the fairness and impartiality of the Commission’s adjudication of Phillips’ case.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/desperate-times-call-for-desperate-measures-part-2/

Desperate solutions to genuinely severe public crises and the breakdown of civil order are not unheard of. We in Canada, for example, experienced martial law during the October Crisis of 1970 when the War Measures Act was invoked to deal with the threat of domestic terrorism in Quebec. The FLQ (the Front de libération du Québec), spurred by the political evangelism of a partisan press, resorted to violence to further the cause of Quebec separatism. Many have claimed that Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau overreacted; his assessment of the risk is still being bruited. But he did not hesitate to respond in decisive fashion, calling out the troops and suspending the writ of habeas corpus when he believed the future of the Confederation was at stake.

America in 2018 is in far graver peril than was Canada in 1970. “Fixing our nation seems like an impossible task,” writes Gary Demar, Senior Fellow at The American Vision, “when the media, the government, the courts, Hollywood, and the schools have been captured by Leftist elites.” In his book Whoever Controls the Schools Rules the World, DeMar argues for parental pushback against the ideological force of government-controlled education as a solution to the problem. Unfortunately, parental revolt, while a good start, is too unorganized and dispersed to be ultimately effective. Something far more comprehensive, potent and systematic is needed to halt the revolutionary momentum of the Left.

This is where, if warranted, the Canadian precedent may come into play. If nothing else works, it follows that a given political instrument that may have a chance of success in combating an insurrectionary movement and in quashing the political and cultural dragonnade threatening the Republic is precisely what no one wants to contemplate: martial law. Dinesh D’Souza concludes his must-read America: Imagine a World without Her treating a possible progressivist triumph with the following words: “[W]e will be living in a totalitarian society … America will truly be an evil empire, and it will be the right and duty of American citizens to organize once again, as in 1776, to overthrow it.”