RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/391566-the-fbis-fractured-fairytale

Once upon a time, the FBI said some thugs planned to rob a bank in town. Thugs are always looking to rob banks. They try all the time. But at this particular time, the FBI was hyper-focused on potential bank robberies in this particular town.

The best way to prevent the robbery — which is the goal, after all — would be for the FBI to alert all the banks in town. “Be on high alert for suspicious activity,” the FBI could tell the banks. “Report anything suspicious to us. We don’t want you to get robbed.”
Instead, in this fractured fairytale, the FBI followed an oddly less effective, more time-consuming, costlier approach. It focused on just one bank. And, strangely, it picked the bank that was least likely to be robbed because nobody thought it would ever get elected president — excuse me, I mean, because it had almost no cash on hand. (Why would robbers want to rob the bank with no cash?)

https://pjmedia.com/trending/state-democratic-parties-accused-of-unprecedented-conspiracy-to-violate-campaign-laws/

A federal lawsuit filed by the Federal Election Commission alleges “an unprecedented, massive, nationwide multi-million dollar conspiracy”involving 40 state Democratic parties who illegally funneled $84 million dollars into the Hillary Clinton campaign for president in 2016.

New York Post:

A federal lawsuit says the Clinton team and the Democratic National Committee went around campaign finance laws by pouring money into state parties that then sent the funds back to the DNC to help Clinton, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.

The Committee to Defend the President, a pro-President Trump PAC, first filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission in December. But the authorities didn’t take action before a required deadline, the group’s campaign finance attorney, who filed the federal lawsuit, told the Review-Journal.

The FEC complaint alleges “an unprecedented, massive, nationwide multi-million dollar conspiracy” in which Dems and Clinton’s camp were “effectively laundering nearly all contributions” given to the Hillary Victory Fund.

That fund is a so-called joint fundraising committee that allowed Clinton to raise money for her campaign and local state parties simultaneously. Possible due to looser campaign finance rules, this type of fund meant Clinton could raise $350,000 or more from a single rich donor.

Backer said most money raised for state parties by the Hillary Victory Fund were then passed back to the DNC and on to Clinton’s campaign.

How very clever of them. Not that it mattered — Clinton lost. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.nysun.com/national/obamacare-could-be-over-as-justice-department/90285/

ObamaCare could soon be history, thanks to a lawsuit filed by 20 states that claim the Affordable Care Act is no longer constitutional. Attorney General Sessions is so sure the states are right that he’s folding his cards. In a rare move, the Justice Department won’t defend a federal law.

The lawsuit argues that last December, when Congress repealed the penalty for not having ObamaCare insurance, it removed the only constitutional grounds for ObamaCare.

Remember that in 2012, the first time the constitutionality of the health law was challenged, Chief Justice Roberts slyly called the penalty for not having insurance a “tax” and justified a five to four ruling in favor of the law by arguing that the Constitution gives the federal government the power to tax.

Voila, the tax is gone, and with it the flimsy constitutional underpinning of the ObamaCare scheme.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/sirhan-sirhan-forgotten-terrorist-assassination-of-robert-kennedy/He assassinated Robert F. Kennedy 50 years ago this week. Young Americans might not even know his name.

What was the first act of Arab terrorism committed inside the United States?

If you were thinking of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which killed six people and wounded 1,000, you’d be off by almost a quarter-century. It actually occurred 50 years ago this week, when Sirhan Bishara Sirhan assassinated Senator Robert F. Kennedy — an act that subverted the American electoral process and altered the history of the United States.

Kennedy had just won the California presidential primary on the night of June 5, 1968, when he thanked a huge crowd of enthusiastic supporters at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and made his way out through the kitchen. Waiting for him there was Sirhan, 24 years old, holding a .22 caliber revolver. Sirhan, a Palestinian Arab, shot the presidential candidate three times — twice in the back and once behind his ear. It was the last shot that proved fatal. Kennedy died 26 hours later at the young age of 42. Five other people in the crowd were wounded but survived.

Because the assassination came just over four years after his brother President John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, and just two months after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in Memphis, the nation focused on gun violence and hatred of the Kennedy family in its aftermath. Many blamed right-wing racists, since the Kennedys had supported the civil-rights movement. I was in school back then, and I remember the most common phrase: “They killed another Kennedy.” The “they” was generic. It wasn’t an individual; it referred to a supposed violent streak that ran through American culture and mythology all the way back to our frontier days.

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/the-barbary-pirates-islamic-terrorism-and-americas-first-military-victory/

Many Americans erroneously trace the roots of Islamic terrorism against their nation to September 11, 2001. In reality, the United States’ very first conflict with Muslim terrorists was also its very first war as a nation — and it won that war 213 years ago, on June 10, 1805.

Centuries before that, the Barbary States of Muslim North Africa — specifically Tripoli, Algiers, Tunis — had been thriving on the slave trade of Europeans abducted from virtually every corner of coastal Europe, including Britain, Ireland, Denmark, and Iceland. These raids were so successful, “between 1530 and 1780 there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly as many as a million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast,” to quote American historian Robert Davis.

The treatment of these European slaves was exacerbated by the fact that they were “infidels” and their owners Muslims. As Robert Playfair (b. 1828), who served for years as a consul in Barbary, explained: “In almost every case they [European slaves] were hated on account of their religion.” Three centuries earlier, John Foxe (b. 1516) had written this in his Book of Martyrs: “In no part of the globe are Christians so hated, or treated with such severity, as at Algiers.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/from-rats-to-rainwater-a-tour-of-new-york-public-housing-1528497745

Last week the story broke that the New York City Housing Authority, by far the nation’s largest system of public housing, will be forced to operate under a federal monitor. The city also will be required to spend $1 billion on repairs and renovations.

Crisis has come to NYCHA-land, as New York magazine once called the city’s public housing system to underscore the sheer isolation of many of its large projects. This past winter, more than three-quarters of the housing authority’s 400,000 tenants, in 176,000 apartments, went without heat and hot water. Mandatory lead-paint inspections were not performed, and then falsely claimed to have been done. The chairwoman of NYCHA’s board resigned under fire. Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared an official state of emergency and went to visit the projects for himself.

Readers may not be surprised, given the terrible reputation of public housing. But for years, a few utopian believers have insisted that New York is different. Take “Public Housing That Worked,” a 2009 book by Nicholas Dagen Bloom, a professor at the New York Institute of Technology. “The New York story provides a fresh perspective on familiar stories of housing failure,” Mr. Bloom writes, “by showing that, rare as it may be, a housing authority dedicated to everyday management can maintain housing even under trying conditions.” He describes NYCHA as having “comparatively tidy grounds” and “well-maintained high-rise buildings.”

That would be news to tenants such as Yajaira Cariani, a 36-year-old single mother of three who lives with her own mother in the Bushwick Houses in Brooklyn. She points to stained and leaking plaster and says there are days she must put out buckets in her living room to catch water pouring in from the roof. A woman on staff at a Baptist church in East New York monitors the Linden Houses, where, she says, “they just don’t pick up the garbage,” and thus rats abound. She tells of nonworking stoves and peeling paint—certified as lead-free, but who knows for sure?

https://www.annistonstar.com/opinion/columns/marc-a-thiessen-obama-took-lying-to-new-heights-with/article_3162e8c6-6b1c-11e8-bb09-83e6f2650005.html

When it comes to the Iran nuclear deal, the Obama administration increasingly appears to have been a bottomless pit of deception.

First, President Barack Obama failed to disclose to Congress the existence of secret side deals on inspections when he transmitted the nuclear accord to Capitol Hill. (They were only uncovered by chance when then-Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., and Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., learned about them during a meeting with International Atomic Energy Agency officials in Vienna.) Then, we learned that the Obama administration had secretly sent a plane to Tehran loaded with $400 million in Swiss francs, euros and other currencies on the same day Iran released four American hostages, which was followed by two more secret flights carrying another $1.3 billion in cash.

Now, in a bombshell revelation, Republicans on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, have revealed in a new report that the Obama administration secretly tried to help Iran use U.S. banks to convert $5.7 billion in Iranian assets, after promising Congress that Iran would not get access to the U.S. financial system — and then lied to Congress about what it had done. (Full disclosure: My wife works for Portman).

https://pjmedia.com/trending/mulvaney-fires-all-25-members-of-cfpb-advisory-board/

Now this is what I call “draining the swamp”:

The Daily Caller:

Mick Mulvaney, acting director of a controversial consumer finance bureau, fired an advisory board after the members criticized the new leadership for not taking their advice.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced Wednesday that the 25 current Consumer Advisory Board members will be replaced, and will be ineligible to reapply to the board, the Washington Post reports.

Eleven advisory board members held a news conference Monday calling out Mulvaney for canceling several meetings — which are required to take place under the Dodd-Frank Act which created the agency.

“It appears the bureau does not want to engage with us,” Ann Baddour, chair of the Consumer Advisory Board and part of Texas Appleseed, a financial, non-profit, said in a conference call reported by The Intercept. “Staying silent would violate our ethical responsibility to the bureau and the American people.”

The criticisms didn’t sit well with the CFPB, and one spokesman suggested the board missed the perks of taxpayer-funded trips to the capital.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-goes-on-a-spending-diet-1528413010

If the Trump White House has a congressional ally in its latest big objective, it’s Rep. Tom Graves. The Georgia Republican is an appropriator, though not a business-as-usual spender. That’s exactly the administration’s new message: We’re done with the usual.

With the economy reaping the fruits of tax cuts and regulatory reform, the Trump administration looks to be getting serious about a neglected campaign promise: spending restraint. Publicly, it’s laying out a strategy to roll back the bloat in last year’s omnibus. Privately, it’s letting Republicans know that the president won’t shy from taking his own party’s lawmakers to task for failure. He’ll have to, or risk flaming out on that crucial pledge.

Candidate Trump promised often to reduce the size of government. He vowed never to run an Obama-size deficit. His budgets have proposed dramatically slashing nondefense spending. Yet the tax cuts widened the deficit. And while Congress’s $1.3 trillion omnibus delivered on defense spending, Democrats demanded huge new outlays for domestic agencies. So Mr. Trump is presiding over trillion-dollar deficits after all.

Whether the president cares much about the economic consequences, he understands the optics. The shellacking the omnibus got from conservative media allies was behind his hesitation to sign the bill, and it inspired his public declaration that he’d “never sign another” like it. With tax cuts done, and his economic team gelling under spending hawk Larry Kudlow, the focus has turned to keeping the promise on spending.

Enter Mr. Graves, who has spent his three years on the House Appropriations Committee shaking up the system. His subcommittee on financial services two weeks ago passed a $23.4 billion fiscal 2019 spending bill—$585 million less than the set spending level. In order to prevent any other committee from swooping in to grab that money, he used the bill to create what he’s calling the Fund for America’s Kids and Grandkids. The $585 million goes in this fund and by law cannot be spent on any other government program until the U.S. is deficit-free. “Just because you can spend it, doesn’t mean you should,” Mr. Graves says. CONTINUE AT SITE