RUTHFULLY YOURS

A unanimous Supreme Court struck a blow for the plain reading of the law on Wednesday, but a pair of dueling concurrences deserve broader attention for what they say about the different methods of legal interpretation on the High Court today.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the full Court in rebuking the Securities and Exchange Commission for reinterpreting the Dodd-Frank Act despite the clear text of the statute (Digital Realty Trust v. Somers ). Paul Somers sued Digital Realty Trust , claiming protection as a whistleblower for filing a complaint about a securities violation. He might have sued under the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley law that protects whistleblowers if they file complaints with the Labor Department within 180 days.

But instead he sued in federal court under Dodd-Frank, which lets whistleblowers who are retaliated against sue and receive double back pay. The problem is that Dodd-Frank defines a whistleblower as someone who provides information about a securities violation to the SEC. Mr. Somers didn’t do that, but the SEC claimed that didn’t matter because Congress intended the law to protect people like Mr. Somers no matter the law’s text.

Citing precedent, Justice Ginsburg rightly wrote that “‘When a statute includes an explicit definition, we must follow that definition,’ even if it varies from a term’s ordinary meaning. This principle resolves the question before us.” She then went on an extended and needless tour of congressional intent that may invite legal mischief down the road.

As the James Comey saga continues to unfold, the James Comey legend continues to unravel. The more we learn about his involvement in the deep state’s illicit targeting of President Trump, the more reason the American people have to question both his motives and his management as director of the FBI, the now-disgraced agency he headed before Trump fired him on May 9, 2017. Comey has left a trail of suspicious activities in his wake.

Comey now looms large over a burgeoning constitutional crisis that could soon overshadow Watergate at its worst. To deepen the crisis even further, it now appears some of Comey’s former FBI and Justice Department colleagues continue to protect him from accountability.

Three suspicious activities stand out, all intertwined: the so-called Comey Memos, Comey’s controversial testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee and Comey’s book deal.
After Comey was fired by President Trump on May 9, 2017, he arranged to give The New York Times a Feb. 14, 2017, memorandum he had written about a one-on-one conversation with Trump regarding former national security adviser Michael Flynn. The New York Times published a report about the memo on May 16, 2017. Special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed the following day.

On June 8, 2017, Comey testified under oath before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, where he stated he authored as many as nine such memos. Regarding the Flynn memo, Comey admitted: “I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter [for The New York Times]. I didn’t do it myself for a variety of reasons, but I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.”

http://politicalmavens.com/

The Mt Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery has induced lactation in a transgender woman who has not had sex-reassignment surgery or breast augmentation; in other words, a biologically correct man who was taking hormones and wanted to nurse the baby born to ze’s partner who is female but didn’t want to nurse. The staff at Mt. Sinai advised this couple on how to acquire and use domperidone, a drug that is not FDA approved, not available in the U.S. and one for which the FDA has issued warnings against serious cardiac problems including death. The team leaders who directed this experimental procedure are an endocrinologist who is committed to the health of the LGBT community and a nurse-practitioner who is an activist transgender woman herself.

After treatment, the patient was able to nurse the newborn infant for a period of six weeks. This “breakthrough” case was written up and published in Transgender Health which admits that it remains unclear whether this fluid is nutritionally equivalent to the milk produced by biological birth mothers. The NY Times (Feb 16) describes at length the advantages of breast feeding – including healthier babies with higher I.Q.’s , better bonding with the mother (in this case, a biological male) and even money-saving on formula. There is no mention of how much the transgender nursing woman spends on hormones compared with infant formula, but ze continues to use a testosterone blocker which is excreted in human milk.

Aside from noting that “some” called this experiment dangerous and disturbing, the Times does not elaborate on whether the “some” are medical professionals or simply ordinary people who may be astounded at the hospital’s sponsorship and supervision of an experiment using a drug considered unsafe and forbidden for sale in the U.S. Furthermore, the Times never questions whether a human infant is the right subject for such experimentation which may be toxic for adults. Do any of us still remember the outrage over testing mascara on innocent rabbits? Are some of us old enough to remember the consequences of using a popular drug prescribed by doctors for morning sickness in pregnant women – thalidomide? Or a drug used by pregnant women which resulted in ovarian cancer in their daughters decades later? Shouldn’t this controversial liquid have been fed to a lab animal for a significant period of time before contemplating feeding it to a human? Are researchers who are activists or medically committed to the needs and wants of the LGBT community the most objective people to weigh the potential harm to an infant versus the political gain to the transgender movement?

There is a world of difference between what adults choose to put into their bodies with questionable medical repercussions and the ethics of doctors supervising experiments which directly impact infants who are fragile and cannot give consent. We are not told what the Ethics Board of Mt. Sinai has to say – perhaps that will await the first lawsuit which is sure to come.

http://jamieglazov.com/2018/02/21/glazov-gang-the-medias-romance-with-north-korea/

This new Glazov Gang episode features Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Fellow at the Freedom Center and editor of The Point at Frontpagemag.com.

Daniel discusses The Media’s Romance With North Korea,unveiling how the Left’s love affair with totalitarian monsters continues full speed ahead.

Don’t miss it!

Why such silence from the media that obsesses over alleged Russian interference in our elections?

While the media obsess over an alleged Russian conspiracy to collude with Donald Trump to affect America’s 2016 presidential election, what about Obama’s interference in the elections of other countries? Most Americans have no idea that President Obama meddled in elections all over the world. And apparently, the media decided there’s no reason for Americans to know about this illegal activity.

Indeed, in 2016, the Los Angeles Times did a story on how America has interfered with other nation’s elections in the past, but they stopped short of mentioning the various foreign elections Obama tried to influence. But the same article reports that Obama “slapped Russia with new penalties for meddling in the U.S. Presidential election… by hacking into Democratic and Republican computer networks and selectively releasing emails.” Hypocrisy check, anyone?

Since that article appeared last December, it has essentially become fake news. The Republican National Committee was never successfully hacked into and evidence is mounting that the DNC was not hacked by Russia. Not only has Wiki Leaks itself insisted Russia was not the source, but a number of cyber security experts, including McAfee antivirus developer John McAfee, disputes this. McAfee says the hack on the DNC “used a piece of malware a year and half old” and was “not an organized hack and certainly not a nation-state that did this.” Moreover, the DNC has never allowed the FBI or any government agency to analyze the computers in question.

Nevertheless, Obama, operating on unconfirmed evidence, abruptly imposed new sanctions on Russia. Many observers believe he did so in order to set the stage for the left to initiate its phony Russian-Trump collusion narrative to be used to remove Trump from office or to defeat him in 2020.

Meddling in other’s elections is a violation of international law. In 1965, the United Nations General Assembly reaffirmed this with a resolution stating: “No State has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal […] affairs of any other State.” And the International Court of Justice also considers such intervention to be illegal. More importantly, U.S. law prohibits the use of tax dollars to influence foreign elections.

Nevertheless, the violation of both American and international law did not stop Obama from intervening repeatedly in the elections of other nations. Moreover, most of Obama’s meddling was known by many foreign correspondents and if it was reported at all, it was downplayed. Most certainly, the media did not condemn it nor drop hints about impeaching Obama.

So let’s get this straight. The media is hysterical about a flimsy conspiracy theory that Russia colluded with Trump to steal the 2016 election but was mostly silent about Obama’s efforts to control the outcome of elections in at least six countries during his tenure. Media bias, anyone? Let’s review the examples we know about:

A Dutch lawyer unconnected to the unproven claim the Trump campaign somehow colluded with Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 election has pled guilty to lying to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators.

This failure – yet again – to indict a Trump campaign official in connection with the campaign’s allegedly collusive behavior appears to constitute another tacit admission by Mueller that the Left’s electoral collusion conspiracy theory that he was commissioned to investigate is utter nonsense. Charging all these people with lying, instead of with anything related to collusion, is likely a prosecutorial tactic to pressure somebody somewhere into doing something. Mueller’s real target seems to be former Trump campaign manager Paul J. Manafort Jr.

This small-potatoes indictment comes a year after the outlines of a Watergate-like conspiracy emerged in which a term-limited Democrat president used the privacy-invading apparatus of the state to spy on a Republican presidential candidate. Watergate differed in that President Nixon didn’t get involved in the plot against the Democratic National Committee until later as an accomplice after the fact.

Mueller’s latest piñata is Alex van der Zwaan, a Russian-speaking, London-based attorney and the son-in-law of Russian oligarch German Borisovich Khan. Khan, who is worth more than $10 billion, was born in Kiev, Ukraine and is reportedly a citizen of Russia, Ukraine, and Israel. Van der Zwaan, 33, married Khan’s daughter, art critic Eva Khan, last year.

Van der Zwaan is the 19th person to be charged by Mueller. On Friday, 13 Russians on a so-called troll farm located in Russia were charged with interfering in the 2016 U.S. election by posing as Americans and organizing political rallies inside the U.S.

The attorney had worked for the international corporate law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom, but the firm indicated it fired him last year and was cooperating with Mueller’s investigation.

I recall the time when President George W. Bush claimed to have looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and seen a soul. My response: “Whose?”In 2006, while I warned Putin was a Stalin-wannabe and enemy of the United States, the Swamp’s “sophisticated” foreign policy swells contemptuously chuckled at my antiquated “Cold War” paranoia. Six years later, when Mitt Romney argued Russia was the most dangerous threat to the United States, he found himself similarly dismissed. Two years after that, when House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chair Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) sounded the alarm over Russian information warfare against the United States, the Obama Administration ignored his warnings and approved Putin controlling 20 percent of our uranium deposits.

So much for Bush seeing souls and Obama’s reset. Sadly, we were but a few of the many voices over the past two decades derided and dismissed respecting Russia’s aims to undermine the United States at home and abroad.

But what of today? With the Swamp’s political class and the lemming media in full clamor over Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s announcement that 13 Russian nationals have been indicted for their attempts to to interfere in America’s 2016 election, one would be tempted to think the true nature of Putin’s revanchist kleptocracy is finally exposed and that those who formerly mocked concern over Russia might finally be ready to do what they can to impede it now.

But one would be wrong.

Given the immense scope of America’s intelligence, counterintelligence, law enforcement, and defense entities entrusted with monitoring the espionage and interference of other nations, why did it take a special counsel to catch this ham-fisted, half-assed gaggle of Russian spooks?

Republicans enacted a tax cut in December and any day now, most of the country will find out about it. News has been travelling slowly because media folk have been diligently cataloging the relatively few examples of Americans who will not receive a direct benefit. But details on the individual and corporate tax reforms have begun to seep out of Washington.

The New York Times reports:

The tax overhaul that President Trump signed into law now has more supporters than opponents, buoying Republican hopes for this year’s congressional elections.

The growing public support for the law coincides with an eroding Democratic lead when voters are asked which party they would like to see control Congress.

The tax cut is already popular among Republicans, adds the Times, and “in contrast with many other issues — including Mr. Trump’s job approval rating — it also appears to be winning over some Democrats. Support for the law remains low among Democrats, but it has doubled over the past two months and is twice as strong as their approval of Mr. Trump today.”

It seems that the more time people have to learn about the new law, the more they like it:

Over all, 51 percent of Americans approve of the tax law, while 46 percent disapprove, according to a poll for The New York Times conducted between Feb. 5 and Feb. 11 by SurveyMonkey. Approval has risen from 46 percent in January and 37 percent in December, when the law was passed.

But the poll results also suggest that the GOP has hardly even begun to reap the political benefits. While an overwhelming majority of Americans has received a tax cut, the survey finds that most people still don’t know it. According to the Times: