RUTHFULLY YOURS

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has offered to provide evidence that the Russian collusion narrative is false in exchange for a pardon from President Trump.

The president, apparently, has not yet gotten the message. On Saturday, President Trump told reporters that he has “never heard” of Assange’s offer to make a deal.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) told The Daily Caller that Trump is being blocked from knowing about the potential deal with Assange. “I think the president’s answer indicates that there is a wall around him that is being created by people who do not want to expose this fraud that there was collusion between our intelligence community and the leaders of the Democratic Party,” Rohrabacher said.
Report: Wikileaks Turned Down Leaks About Russian Government During Campaign

“The congressman spoke to chief of staff John Kelly two weeks ago about the potential deal with Assange,” The Daily Caller reported. “The Wall Street Journal reported that Kelly told Rohrabacher to bring the information to the intelligence community.”

“This would have to be a cooperative effort between his own staff and the leadership in the intelligence communities to try to prevent the president from making the decision as to whether or not he wants to take the steps necessary to expose this horrendous lie that was shoved down the American people’s throats so incredibly earlier this year,” Rohrabacher said.

Rohrabacher called the collusion narrative “a massive propaganda campaign” and “historic con job” meant to conceal the ideological conspiracy between the intelligence community and the Democrat party.

Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation has uncovered a fascinating vignette from the swamp, involving high-level secrets, Clinton friends, and apparent failure to obey the rules. Oh, yeah – and money.

A company whose president is “best friends” with Chelsea Clinton received more than $11 million in contracts over the last decade from a highly secretive Defense Department think tank, but to date, the group lacks official federal approval to handle classified materials, according to sensitive documents TheDCNF was allowed to view.

Jacqueline Newmyer, the president of a company called the Long Term Strategy Group (LTSG), has over the last 10 years received numerous Department of Defense (DOD) contracts from a secretive think tank called Office of Net Assessment (ONA).

The important context here is the practice of contracting out highly sensitive policy-related functions to people who may or may not be reliable, because they and or their facilities have not gone through proper screening.

Adam Lovinger, a whistleblower and 12-year ONA veteran, has repeatedly warned ONA’s leadership they faced risks by relying on outside contractors as well as the problem of cronyism, and a growing “revolving door” policy where ONA employees would leave the defense think tank and join private contractors to do the same work.

This is classic example of Beltway Bandits cashing in and building big businesses, cutting themselves in for a piece of the action. The government pays more, the workers get more, the contractor take a percentage off the top, and everybody wins – except taxpayers. This happens on a vast scale, and when national security is involved, the stakes are high.

Still, the nature of the work performed for all those millions has a whiff of cronyism more than security lapses.

One of Lovinger’s main complaints about ONA was that many of the reports contractors imparted very little new information to the think tank. “Over the years ONA’s analytic staff has expressed how they learn very little from many (if not most) of our often very thin and superficial contractor reports,” he wrote in the Sept. 30, 2016 email.

Some of LTSG’s reports bear out Lovinger’s critique. A September 2010 LTSG report, titled “Trends in Elite American Attitudes Toward War,” came to the astounding conclusion that, “American intellectuals have for the last century held considerably more cosmopolitan views than their non-intellectual counterparts.”

Another LTSG report was “On the Nature of Americans as a Warlike People.”

Lovinger also suggested in a March 3, 2017 memo to the record that contractor studies should be peer reviewed. “There has never been an external review of these contractors’ research products,” he said, adding, “It is now clear that over several decades the office transferred millions of dollars to inexperienced and unqualified contractors.”

The contempt for taxpayers is almost palpable here.

It is hard to say what exactly NFL players who take a knee during the national anthem are protesting, but if it is alleged social injustice and police brutality against African-Americans, these players have to explain their own record of brutality and injustice against their fellow Americans.

We are all familiar with the workplace sign touting the number of days since the last accident. NFL locker rooms should have a sign showing the last player arrest for a criminal act. As of September 25, as Joseph Curl points out at the Daily Wire, it had been a mere 23 days since the last NFL player had been arrested for a crime. The average is about a week between NFL player arrests:

The average time between arrests is just seven days, while the record without an arrest is slightly more than two months, at 65 days, according to NFLarrest.com, which “provides an interactive visualized database of National Football League player Arrests & Charges,” the site says.

Players get arrested for a variety of crimes: drunk driving, drug offenses, domestic violence, assault and battery, gun violations, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, theft, burglary, rape and even murder

The NFL virtually embraces players who abuse women. Take this report in the Chicago Tribune: “In the first round [of the 2017 draft], the Oakland Raiders drafted Gareon Conley, who has been accused of rape. In the second round, the Cincinnati Bengals selected Joe Mixon, who in a much-viewed video punches a woman so hard that she falls down unconscious. In the sixth round, the Cleveland Browns selected Caleb Brantley, who was accused of doing pretty much what Mixon did.”

You might not be able to access NFLarrest.com. Recently the website was down due to heavy traffic, probably from disgruntled fans, many of them veterans, curious about the hypocrisy of the NFL and its players regarding violence and brutality. An early 2017 database of NFL player-criminals is available here.

Perhaps the most notorious NFL player-criminal was Aaron Hernandez of the New England Patriots, who was convicted of murder:

Aaron Hernandez’s murder conviction was formally vacated on Tuesday by a judge in Massachusetts because Mr. Hernandez died before his appeal was heard.

Mr. Hernandez, a former tight end with the New England Patriots, was convicted in 2015 in the killing of Odin L. Lloyd, who was dating the sister of his fiancée. Mr. Hernandez hanged himself in prison last month….

“In our book, he’s guilty, and he’s going to always be guilty,” Mr. Lloyd’s mother, Ursula Ward, told reporters after the ruling.

Another player arrested for a criminal act which killed people was Leonard Little. If you want talk about flaws in the criminal justice system, look at his crimes and the meager punishment:

Little was a star player in college and was drafted as an All-American into the NFL in 1998. The same year the North Carolina native started playing for the big leagues, Little left a birthday party drunk and decided to drive home anyway. In an inebriated state, the St. Louis Rams player drove through a red light, crashed into a vehicle, killing a mother and two children. Little was lucky and didn’t go to prison but instead received four years probation and 1,000 hours of community service. In 2004, Little was arrested again for driving drunk upon failing three roadside sobriety tests. He was sentenced to two years probation.

When Left and Right finally agree on something, watch out: The unthinkable becomes normal.

So it is with changing attitudes toward Silicon Valley.

For the last two decades, Apple, Google, Amazon, and other West Coast tech corporations have been untouchable icons. They piled up astronomical profits while hypnotizing both left-wing and right-wing politicians.

Conservative administrations praised them as modern versions of 19th-century risk-takers such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Bill Gates, the late Steve Jobs, and other tech giants were seen as supposedly creating national wealth in an unregulated, laissez-faire landscape that they had invented from nothing.

At a time when American companies were increasingly unable to compete in the rough-and-tumble world arena, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook bulldozed their international competition. Indeed, they turned high-tech and social media into American brands.

The Left was even more enthralled. It dropped its customary regulatory zeal, despite Silicon Valley’s monopolizing, outsourcing, offshoring, censoring, and destroying of startup competition. After all, Big Tech was left-wing and generous. High-tech interests gave hundreds of millions of dollars to left-wing candidates, think tanks, and causes.

Companies such as Facebook and Google were able to warp their own social-media protocols and Internet searches to insidiously favor progressive agendas and messaging.

If the Left feared that the tech billionaires were becoming robber barons, they also delighted in the fact that they were at least left-wing robber barons.

Unlike the steel, oil, and coal monopolies of the 19th century that out of grime and smoke created the sinews of a growing America, Silicon Valley gave us shiny, clean, green, and fun pods, pads, and phones.

As a result, social media, Internet searches, texts, email, and other computer communications were exempt from interstate regulatory oversight. Big Tech certainly was not subject to the rules that governed railroads, power companies, trucking industries, Wall Street, and television and radio.

But attitudes about hip high-tech corporations have now changed on both the left and right.

Liberals are under pressure from their progressive base to make Silicon Valley hire more minorities and women.

Progressives wonder why West Coast techies cannot unionize and sit down for tough bargaining with their progressive billionaire bosses.

Local community groups resent the tech giants driving up housing prices and zoning out the poor from cities such as Seattle and San Francisco.

Behind the veneer of a cool Apple logo or multicolored Google trademark are scores of multimillionaires who live one-percenter lifestyles quite at odds with the soft socialism espoused by their corporate megaphones.

Conservatives got sick of Silicon Valley, too.

The Democrat’s Trump/Russia collusion narrative took a major hit this week when Facebook leaks about Russia-linked ads forced disappointed Dems to walk back their anti-Trump messaging. Congressional leaders, in the meantime, have reportedly renewed their focus on team Obama’s election year political espionage.

The anti-Trumpers had a promising story-line — “Trump and Russia colluded on Facebook” — that had to be downgraded to merely “Russia sought to create incivility and chaos” when it was discovered that the Russia-linked group in question promoted issues and groups on both sides of the political spectrum.

According to Facebook’s investigators, the company sold up to $150,000 worth of ads to a Russian government-affiliated troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency which bought the ads through hundreds of phony Facebook pages and accounts.

The intelligence community describes the Internet Research Agency as “a state-funded organization that blogs and tweets on behalf of the Kremlin.”

At least one of the over 3,000 Russia-bought ads, which Facebook will soon turn over to Congress, promoted Black Lives Matter and specifically targeted audiences in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, CNN reported, Wednesday.

The Black Lives Matter ad appeared on Facebook at some point in late 2015 or early 2016, the sources said. The sources said it appears the ad was meant to appear both as supporting Black Lives Matter but also could be seen as portraying the group as threatening to some residents of Baltimore and Ferguson.

New descriptions of the Russian-bought ads shared with CNN suggest that the apparent goal of the Russian buyers was to amplify political discord and fuel an atmosphere of incivility and chaos, though not necessarily to promote one candidate or cause over another. Facebook’s review of Russian efforts on its platform focused on a timeframe from June 2015 to May 2017.

These ranged from posts promoting Black Lives Matter to posts promoting gun rights and the Second Amendment to posts warning about what they said was the threat undocumented immigrants posed to American democracy. Beyond the election, Russians have sought to raise questions about western democracies.

According to the Washington Post, other ads showed support for Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton among Muslim women.

“This is consistent with the overall goal of creating discord inside the body politic here in the United States, and really across the West,” said Steve Hall, a former CIA officer and CNN National Security Analyst. “It shows they the level of sophistication of their targeting. They are able to sow discord in a very granular nature, target certain communities and link them up with certain issues.”

Republican Sen. Richard Burr, the chairman of the committee, said Tuesday that there’s “no evidence yet” that Russians and Trump officials colluded on the Facebook ads, but said “it’s an area the committee continues to investigate.”

While the Trump/Russia collusion investigation ran into a speed bump, this week, the unmasking probe gained steam.

Congressional republicans have turned their attention to team Obama’s efforts to obtain highly classified intelligence information on Trump and his allies before the inauguration.

U.S officials familiar with the situation told the Washington Free Beacon that Obama administration National Security Adviser Susan Rice’s recent testimony before the House Intelligence Committee “place renewed attention on the investigation” into why highly classified intelligence community reports were obtained and then leaked to the press.

Congressional leaders are also reportedly interested in finding out why former United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power and other senior Obama officials made an unusually high number of unmasking requests during the final months of the Obama administration.

“It was understood in the Bush administration that unmasking was out of the ordinary; it was something rare that you might sometimes do but needed a special and easily defensible reason for doing,” said a former official who served in several Republican administrations. “You could not ask out of mere curiosity, nor obviously for political reasons. There needed to be a clear, direct national security justification.” CONTINUE AT SITE

President Trump might not be winning when it comes to shuffling legislation through Congress, but the same cannot be said when it comes to regulatory rollback.

On the latter matter, his actions set a historic precedent. That is likely good for the economy and may help explain the surging stock market.

“There’s a massive movement on regulations in the first few months of Trump,” says David Ranson, director of research at HCWE & Co.

How massive? As Mr. Trump might say, it’s Bigly.

In the first place, the administration isn’t producing a ton of new regulations.

“By virtually any measure, dating back through two Democratic presidents and one Republican president, the lack of regulatory output is historic,” states a recent study by the American Action Forum, a right-leaning think tank.

“Actual output was just 8 percent of the historical average,” AAF says.

The study looked at data on regulations from 1994 through 2017, specifically focusing on the period Jan. 23 to May 23 during each year.

Better still, the White House team have been busy nixing regulations.

Under the Trump administration, 64 percent of reviews by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs “have resulted in withdrawn rules,” which compares with withdrawal rates of 25 percent in 2009 and 55 percent in 2001, the report says. Both 2001 and 2009 were the first years of the prior two administrations.

Perhaps the biggest achievement of all is that the cost of introduced regulations was a fraction of those in past periods. This time the AAF reviewed data for the years 2005 through 2017.

“There have been $4.2 billion in regulatory costs since January 23, 2017,” the report states. “The 2005 to 2017 average is $26 billion.” Figures include the costs of independent agencies.

Or put another way, costs imposed by the administration are running at just 16 percent of the historical norm.

“Across the board, the results indicate a significant diminution in the number of regulations approved and a notable uptick in the number of withdrawn measures (previous rules from the Obama Administration no longer under consideration),” the report reads.

So what?

The fact that the administration is rolling back regulations in this way is good for the economy.

“My impression is that heavy regulation might slow growth and it certainly increases costs,” says Dr. Ivo Pezzuto, professor of global economics at ISM Business School in Paris.

Put another way, when regulation gets rolled back then business costs fall, profits rise, and growth can accelerate. At least that is the theory.

Statistical analysis shows this to be true as well. CONTINUE AT SITE

Just two or three generations ago, most Americans understood that George Orwell’s classics Animal Farm and 1984 were written to explain how freedom is lost to totalitarianism and the intolerance that accompanies it. “Big Brother,” a term that many people still casually use to describe an all-knowing governing authority, comes right out of 1984. In the society that Orwell describes, all citizens are continually reminded that “Big Brother is watching you,” by way of a constant surveillance through the pervasive use of “telescreens” by the ruling class.

Orwell’s warnings about totalitarianism written in novel form in Animal Farm and 1984 came shortly after Freidrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom was published at the end of World War II. But it took the shocking revelations from books on Nazism and Soviet Communism, by scholars like William Shirer and Robert Conquest in the 1960s, to really make Orwell relevant for teaching to the masses educated in American public schools. And it was not just an academic exercise insofar as Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, was at that time brutally crushing all resistance, enforcing the Soviet model of totalitarian control on East European countries that became satellite states of Moscow.

Reading Orwell, it was thought, would help American students appreciate their freedoms and gain perspective and critical faculties so as to understand socialist totalitarianism and its defining features: 1) the institutionalization of propaganda designed to warp and destroy people’s grasp on reality, and 2) the fostering of group think, conformity and collectivism designed to eliminate critical and independent thinking. By making the press subservient to the state, these two features would prevent the rise of an opposition movement or party and protect and perpetuate one party control.

Orwell described the scope of the totalitarian enterprise, noting in one section of 1984 that “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, and every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

The concepts of “newspeak” and “doublethink” in Orwell’s 1984 are fully manifest in what we now experience as political correctness. Newspeak is the distorted reality accomplished by manipulating the meaning of language and words, while double think is the conditioned mental attitude to ignore reality and common sense and substitute and embrace a distorted or false narrative to the exclusion of other views. As Orwell notes, “the whole aim of Newspeak and Doublethink is to narrow the range of thought.” This is the goal of political correctness, and it explains why its adherents tend to be so intolerant—shutting down speech from the politically incorrect on college campuses across the county, demanding that historic statues and monuments associated with the Confederacy be taken down, and demanding that people with opposing views on such subjects as climate change and gay marriage be silenced, fined or arrested.

Many assume there is a long way to go before the American government has the power of Orwell’s Big Brother. After all, the thinking goes, the press in the U.S. is not controlled by the government so Americans cannot be so easily brainwashed as they theoretically would be through state-controlled propaganda.

But what if the universities and the educational system and the major television and print media institutions embrace the groupthink that ingratiates them with the ruling elite? What if the culture shapers in Hollywood and the advertising industry on Madison Avenue follow a similar path in participating in and reinforcing the same groupthink norms?

The Hollywood faithful turned out with all their finery to reward one another with self-reverential awards called Emmys. As the public now knows this event turned into a verbal auto de fe of President Trump.

That, of course, isn’t surprising. The anti-Trump vulgarity of Steven Colbert has already been on display before. But what always surprises me is the level of ignorance.

Last week the Hollywood Left was raising money to combat Global Warming. How these well meaning dupes intend to do so isn’t clear. Will DiCaprio give up his private plane? Stevie Wonder said if you don’t agree with these suppositions you either don’t care or you are dumb. This hardly seems like the right way to secure adherents.

But the celebrity who got my attention is Beyoncé. This self-appointed queen of pop said Global Warming, about which the Trump administration is presumably indifferent, causes earthquakes. Now this is a scientific breakthrough. Up until this “revelation” I assumed earthquakes were related to seismic waves that make the ground shake. When plates rub against each other they stick, the rocks break and earthquakes occur. However, I have been deceived; earthquakes develop from CO2 cast into the atmosphere. There is simply no telling where these scientific ideas will lead.

Now in order to be a star of the first magnitude, you have to have a cause. It must be bigger than the self. If it evokes tears, all the better. You might start in Africa, a continent in need of all kinds of aid. Angelina Jolie shows up there routinely as does Madonna. If I take off my cynical judgment, it is possible some of the Hollywood glitterati actually perform good deeds.

Nonetheless, it is best to maintain a wary eye where these devotees of good deeds are concerned. I make this claim because good intentions often foster bad results; in part because so many of these stars know so little. It is instructive that Sean Penn, a high school dropout, has arrogated to himself the role of environmental moralizer.

As I see it, the time has come for these folks to get over themselves. Rather than spend time telling me and others how to live our lives, they would be better off making good films. By the way, there are very few good films that are made as reduced Hollywood profits attest. The producers of the Emmys might also take notice of the fact this recent fiasco of Trump-bashing led to the worst rating for any of these shows. Don’t these people realize the U.S. has Trump supporters? America isn’t Hollywood, even if George Clooney, among others, doesn’t know that.

As a youngster, I didn’t salute the flag or stand for the national anthem. It ran against my religious teachings.

Each year, my mother would take me to the principal’s office on the first day of school and explain that we were Jehovah’s Witnesses, which meant that I would remain silent while my classmates recited the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. When my father, who was divorced from my mother and not a member of the church, took me to sporting events, he stood for the national anthem while I sat. He never said anything to me about it. He respected my mother’s desire to raise her children in the faith of her choice.

Growing up, I was taught that the flag was an idol and that saluting it was a form of idolatry, which was forbidden. Indeed, all forms of patriotism were discouraged. No joining the military. No running for office. No voting or taking sides in political debates. Even membership in civic groups, such as the Boy Scouts, was frowned upon. Over the decades, Witnesses endured fierce opposition for holding such beliefs. They were tried for sedition. Their homes were vandalized and their businesses were boycotted. In the 1930s and ’40s, church members were physically attacked by angry mobs of people who prided themselves on their loyalty and patriotism. The Witnesses turned to courts for protection and were mostly successful in obtaining it, whether the issue was door-to-door proselytizing, conscientious objection to the draft, or mandatory flag salutes.

The reason the principal had to accede to my mother’s wishes is because the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled, in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), that forcing children to salute the flag violated the Constitution. The court held that saluting the flag is a form of utterance and that the right to not speak is as equally protected under the First Amendment as the right to free speech. “The case is made difficult not because the principles of its decision are obscure but because the flag involved is our own,” wrote Justice Robert Jackson for the 6-3 majority. “Nevertheless, we apply the limitations of the Constitution with no fear that freedom to be intellectually and spiritually diverse or even contrary will disintegrate the social organization. To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds.” The decision was handed down on Flag Day.

To my mother’s chagrin, the religion didn’t stick and I left the church voluntarily in my teens. I still remember attending a college basketball game with my father and standing for the national anthem for the first time. He did a little double take as I rose beside him. Then he put his arm around me and pulled me closer to him. I’ve been a political commentator for more than 20 years now. I vote. I take sides. A large framed reproduction of Jasper Johns’s “Flag” hangs above the fireplace in my living room. But when I see, as we all did on Sunday, professional athletes catching flak from the president on down for taking a knee during the national anthem, it takes me back to my childhood. I can’t help but feel for them.

According to Muslim feminist bloggers, who write regularly for the site muslimgirl.com, MAS, ICNA, and ISNA are blatantly racist.

If Sarsour and her fellow Islamists in the United States are to be believed, they work to “make America better…” “…out of love” for fellow Americans. Yet, their behavior tells another story — one of closeted bigotry and deceit — all for the purpose of legitimizing their own false claims to the leadership of mainstream Muslims.

In an interview published on ISNA’s website, Muzzammil Siddiqi called homosexuality a “moral corruption,” and explicitly stated that he supports laws in countries that execute homosexuals. ISNA’s annual convention included Yasir Qadhi, dean of academic affairs at AlMaghrib Institute, who has been recorded teaching students that killing homosexuals is part of Islam.

“Islam is a religion of peace, but you can’t have peace without justice,” said self-styled “civil rights activist” Linda Sarsour at the Muslim American Society-Islamic Circle of North America (MAS-ICNA) convention in December 2016. Sarsour, who describes herself as a “Palestinian-American feminist,” is but one example of a radical Muslim in the West who has carefully cultivated an image of herself as righteously preoccupied with liberal values and social justice — and Islamist organizations, such as MAS, ICNA and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), have tried to do the same.

A highlight reel from the MAS-ICNA convention features author Yasmin Mogahed declaring, “We have to care about the pain and struggles of others,” as well as a prominent imam, Omar Suleiman, asking, “What have we done for the marginalized in this country?”

In a promotional video released in 2016, the organization’s president, Azhar Azeez, boasts of “bringing a very positive impact to our communities across the nation.”

According to Muslim feminist bloggers, however, who write regularly for the site muslimgirl.com, MAS, ICNA, and ISNA are blatantly racist. One such observer, in a piece titled “Mainstream Islamic Conferences Have a Longstanding History of Normalizing Anti-Blackness,” writes:

“When I look at mosques that perpetuate patriarchal violence, I see it as powerless men trying to feel in control. Conferences are no different. Often times, it’s non-Black Muslims (mostly Arab and Desi) who organize these tone-deaf conferences, and use them as tools of oppression to silence the voices and contributions of those who are more marginalized (mostly Black Muslims).”

She continued:

“Remember last year when ICNA asked participants in a speed dating event what skin color was preferred for their potential partner? The fact that they didn’t understand why that was problematic the first time is enough of an indicator.”

Another blogger on the site recounts attending the April 2017 ICNA convention in Baltimore — “one of the most historically black cities in our nation” — and discovering that not even a panel on “America’s Original Sins: Racism and Social Inequality” included a black, Latino, or female speaker.