RUTHFULLY YOURS

The low U.S. labor force participation rate has several causes, but a major one is the disincentive to work created by government programs. The Republican Party’s growth wing has spent years developing ideas for addressing these incentives not to work and rise up the economic ladder, and the results are starting to show.

Last month to almost no attention the House Ways and Means Committee moved a bill from Chairman Kevin Brady that would update the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, known as TANF. This program is the result of the Newt Gingrich-Bill Clinton 1996 welfare reform.

The American Enterprise Institute’s Robert Doar noted recently that TANF on the whole is a success. The program has declined as a share of 1996 spending while Medicaid and food stamps have exploded. One big reason is because TANF is a block grant to states, unlike the Medicaid racket that allows states to draw down more federal dollars for every new enrollee. The program even survived attempts at sabotage by the Obama Administration like expanding waivers for work requirements.

The current system requires states to engage 50% of families in work activities. But that means states can write off some of the tougher cases. And gimmicks like a “caseload reduction credit” allow states to buy down the 50% rate to a much lower benchmark or even 0% of families. Mr. Brady’s bill would require that 100% of recipients engage in work or training as a precondition of receiving benefits.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/economy-jobs-report-more-openings-than-seekers/

The U.S. economy reached a record 6.7 million job openings in April, the Department of Labor stated Tuesday, hundreds of thousands more than the number of unemployed workers.

March and April both saw the number of job openings outstrip the number of unemployed workers.

There were 6.7 million job openings in April and only 6.35 million job seekers. The previous month saw 6.63 million job openings, more than the 6.59 million unemployed workers.

The number of openings has never been higher than the number of job seekers since the government started counting employment opportunities in 2000.

May saw 223,000 jobs added to the U.S. economy.

Obama defies the Constitution but sounds ‘presidential.’ Trump follows it but sounds like a loudmouth from Queens.

Donald Trump blusters nonstop. He offers contrasting messages about whether, on any given day, he might fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. His tweets are certainly not presidential, at least as the adjective is usually understood.

At perpetual campaign rallies, Trump mocks his critics, caricaturing their voices and slamming them with adolescent epithets like “Cryin’ Chuckie Schumer.” He accuses House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of being an enabler of M-13 gang members after she chastised him for calling such psychopaths “animals.” Trump has defined his own uncouthness, which so incenses his opponents, as “the new presidential.”

Yet so far, after over a year of intense investigation, Special Counsel Mueller has found no evidence that Donald Trump — or even his low-level subordinates — had ever colluded with Russian government interests to hijack the 2016 election and defeat Hillary Clinton. Indeed, Mueller has shown himself desperate to indict almost anyone connected with the Trump campaign with almost any charge he can think of — other than colluding with the Russians to warp an election, his original mandate.

Call the Trump paradox “crass lawfulness.” What drives Trump’s critics nearly crazy is not any evidence that Trump has broken federal laws per se. Instead, their rub is that there are somehow no criminal statutes against a president boorishly acting “unpresidential” in his loud quest to supercharge the economy, while undoing the entire agenda of his predecessor, who was so dearly beloved by the media, universities, Hollywood, and identity-politics groups.

Certainly, President Obama’s teleprompted speeches were mellifluous. As some sort of postmodern preacher, Obama often sermonized to Americans about the predetermined “arc of history” that purportedly bent all of us inescapably toward his own just moral version of the universe.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/masterpiece-cakeshop-setback-liberty/

This was a straightforward free-expression case, and the Court could have resolved the dispute in favor of liberty.

I must respectfully disagree with the editors regarding the Supreme Court’s ruling in Masterpiece Cakeshop.

Professor Steve Vladek is right: The decision is “remarkably narrow.” One cannot help but be struck by the majority’s reticence from the outset: “Whatever the outcome of some future controversy involving facts similar to these, the Commission’s actions here violated the Free Exercise Clause.” Mind you, this is from the pen of Anthony Kennedy, a judicial supremacist who ordinarily interrupts his liberty bender only to scold the People — formerly known as the sovereign — to pipe down and quit grousing once the Robed Nine have spoken.

On this one, though, Justice Kennedy assures the Left it can grouse away. This ruling, in grudging accommodation of religious conviction, will not necessarily bear on the outcome “of some future controversy involving facts similar to these.”

To be sure, I am all for a Lincolnian construction that reduces Supreme Court rulings to a duly narrow resolution of the dispute between the litigating parties, leaving it to the republic to govern itself accountably. But that is not what’s going on here. This case is a one-off. The justices, manifestly pained, side ever so ambiguously with religious liberty, a founding principle of the nation, over gay marriage, a trendy progressive cause that would not remotely have been threatened in Colorado had Jack Phillips been left in peace to honor his convictions.

Kennedy’s sweet-mystery-of-life jurisprudence is all about exploring the exotic contours of liberty to discover heretofore unknown substantive safeguards. Not in this case, though. Confronted by a liberty twofer — an attack on free-expression rights that also burdens religious liberty — the justices punt on substantive protections for traditional religious exercise and speech (the latter liberty that could and should have decided the case in Mr. Phillips’s favor); they agitate, instead, over procedural flaws in the state’s adjudication of the conscience question.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/debbie-wasserman-schultz-shield-tech-aide-capitol-hill-hacking-probe/

Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D., Fla.) intervened in a Pakistani land dispute on behalf of her then-IT aide, Imran Awan, before pressuring House officials to kill an investigation into his hacking of House servers, according to a new Daily Caller report.

Awan, who worked as an IT aide for roughly two-thirds of House Democrats, was found to have gained “unauthorized access” to House servers in July 2016. The finding came just three days after Wikileaks released the first batch of hacked Democratic National Committee emails, at a time when Wasserman Schultz led the DNC.

Unlike most of her Democratic colleagues, who promptly fired Awan upon learning of the investigation, Wasserman Schultz became “frantic, not normal” and began “making the rounds” to pressure House officials to kill the probe, according to the Caller‘s sources. She subsequently attacked House chief administrative officer Phil Kiko, calling him a “f***ing Islamophobe.”

Wasserman Schultz reportedly enjoyed a close relationship Awan. The Caller‘s House sources claimed she had told Kiko she invited the entire Awan family to her daughter’s Bat Mitzvah, and that she “helped [Awan] with a land deal.”

https://spectator.org/team-muellers-illegal-unethical-hunt-for

In the early 1970s, when I was a freshly minted Special Attorney with the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section of the U.S. Justice Department, my fellow newly hired colleagues and I attended a lecture at Main Justice given by John Dowd, a well-regarded veteran prosecutor. His topic was the then little known and almost never used Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.

Dowd explained in detail the vast sweep of the statute and described the mind-boggling powers that Congress had conferred on us. In those long gone days of limited federal jurisdiction, we had a hard time processing what he was saying. According to him, Congress had effectively federalized almost every form of state criminal activity and had provided draconian and almost unimaginable punitive measures designed to strip defendants of their liberty and property.

Frankly, we thought Dowd was crazy. As he described it, RICO seemed too good to be true. But it wasn’t. We soon learned that he wasn’t nuts but a prophet, and, within a few short years, RICO became a standard prosecutorial bat that we enthusiastically swung with both hands.

I lost track of John Dowd until he became co-lead counsel of the president’s legal team dealing with Robert Mueller’s investigation of purported collusion between the Trump campaign and unnamed Russian operatives. To my dismay, I watched Dowd and co-counsel Ty Cobb pursue a course of complete transparency and cooperation with Mueller. According to media reports, they voluntarily produced over a million pages of documents and made administration witnesses available for interrogation. All of this was premised on the stated belief that the Trump campaign did not collude with Russia and that the president did not obstruct justice by firing FBI Director James Comey.

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.”