RUTHFULLY YOURS

Do these kneeling football players know anything about truly oppressive regimes?

Watching the now weekly spectacle of football players bending their knees in protest when the National Anthem is played makes me wonder if they have ever given a scintilla of thought to the bended knees of broken women as they are sold in the slave markets of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and now Turkey, where “the Islamic State has merely transferred its slave business into Turkey – including a market in Turkey’s capital Ankara. This means ISIS is involved in the slavery industry in a European country.” Moreover, does Kaepernick know that black Africans owning other black Africans has existed in Mauritania for generations and continues to this day?

Has he ever read the searing accounts by North Koreans describing the misery of life in that totalitarian regime? Do his football buddies shed tears for the murder of North Koreans who defect and are shot by their own government, as happened the other day? When these helmeted athletes speak of injustice, do the names Farzana Iqbal and Samia Imran come to mind? These Pakistani women were “honor-killed” by members of their own family because they dared to marry men of their own choosing. Samia’s mother carried out the murder of her own daughter, while Farzana was stoned to death by twelve male relatives, including her father, brothers, and cousins. No one was prosecuted for these heinous crimes.

I dare Colin and his partners on the football field to rail against this ongoing racism, injustice, and evil.

Have these players ever spoken out about the decimation of young blacks in the streets of Chicago, where gangs rule? If they are truly interested in helping, why not work to get the corrupt Democrat machinery out of the inner cities and finally clean up the urban ghettoes so mothers can wheel their baby carriages without fear of being caught in a drive-by shooting?

I wonder as I look in disbelief if these players, who are generally selected more for their brawn than for their brains, even understand what they are doing. According to Doreen S. Felix over at the New Yorker the kneel, having symbolized a protest directed at alleged police brutality against black Americans, has morphed into outright opposition to Trump or even just a gesture “of free speech itself.” Then again…”it’s a reaction to Trump’s ‘buck-breaking’ rhetoric,” or it’s “about broken alliances, presumably between the team owners, many of whom donated to the Trump campaign,” and finally, “it has become ‘about the pride of the N.F.L.'”

In the muddled minds of these men who make millions of dollars throwing a ball around, it is breathtaking to see how they squander what could be their finest moment. It is a disgrace on so many fronts. The only apparent effect of all this knee-bending is that the NFL has lost one million viewers.

A New York Times article by Billy Witz highlights that “Kaepernick was … cleaning up a mess of his own … when photos surfaced of him wearing socks … that featured cartoon pigs wearing policeman’s caps.” But is this really a surprise, given that his “conversion to social activism occurred once he began dating activist DJ Nessa Diab, who has frequently spoken about perceived racial injustices and ‘Islamophobia’ in the U.S.”? Diab is an ardent supporter of Black Lives Matter and Muslim activism. Could one say a vulnerable football player just got played by a savvy operator?

Men accused of sexual taint continue to be beheaded by the media, falling like aristocrats trundled to the guillotine. The latest in the tumbrel full of miscreants to go under the blade is Matt Lauer, who was fired from NBC’s Today show for sexual misconduct. Apparently, Lauer’s tribe numbers in the hundreds of thousands.

Or more.

But just as it seems every man is a predator and every woman has been wrongfully fondled, there is a small cloud on the horizon that augers a storm. The cloud may portend a new revolution.

Revolutions often begin with questions about truth and reality. What is the truth behind the accusations? Are men automatically guilty if accused? Should we consider whether women can be as predatory as men? Are all the accusing women innocent victims? Are none of them looking for power or money?

Maybe there is a little room for realistic cynicism.

As Angelo Codevilla recently pointed out, “Men, but mostly women, have been trading erotic services for access to power since time began.” As he observed sexual power plays during his eight years on the Senate staff, “Access to power, or status, or the appearance thereof was on one side, sex on the other. Innocence was the one quality entirely absent on all sides.”

Codevilla’s point is that all sexual transgression, including bargaining and power mongering, is held to be entirely the fault of men. But not all can be blamed on what radical feminists see as an inherently detestable and predatory patriarchy.

Women can be just as predatory as men, sexually and otherwise. Though assigned invisibility by most contemporary feminists who have a vested interest in the myth of women as always and forever victims of men, Phyllis Chesler and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, both cool-headed analysts, have shown that women can be as cruel and heartlessly manipulative toward men and other women as men can be toward women and other men.

“Mr. Rubio may be setting himself up to run as a social conservative hero in 2024, or even 2020 if President Trump declines to run, and the child credit obsession is a down payment on that brand. Yet voters looking for a candidate who understands what makes America—and American families—prosper will have to look elsewhere.”

The GOP is pushing forward on tax reform, though a receiving line of Republican holdouts are slow-rolling progress. One who deserves special mention is Marco Rubio, who contributed nothing to ObamaCare repeal and now aspires to dilute the tax bill. Voters ought to remember this when he’s next pitching himself for President.

On Wednesday Mr. Rubio and his political sidecar, Mike Lee of Utah, announced that they’ll file an amendment to the tax bill to change the $2,000 child tax credit. They want to make the credit refundable up to a person’s payroll tax liability, among other expensive tweaks. To pay for the changes, Messrs. Rubio and Lee would increase the corporate tax rate to 22% from the bill’s 20%.

If Mr. Rubio thinks payroll taxes are too high, he can propose a payroll tax cut. But then he’d have to weather the political fight of going after funding for Medicare and Social Security. So instead his back-door plan is to expand a refundable credit, which delivers checks to folks who owe no federal income tax. This is a disincentive to work and we would have thought antithetical to conservative principles.

More destructive is his increase in the corporate tax rate, which is the most pro-growth plank in the bill and could significantly increase what Americans earn since much of the tax falls on labor. A point or two more may seem like no big deal but it might be the difference between making the U.S. more competitive than the OECD’s roughly 24% average—or not. And that’s a mere average. One competitor for investment is Ireland’s 12.5% rate.

Mr. Rubio knows this, or ought to, yet his press release could have been written by Democratic leader Chuck Schumer. “Right now, 70 percent of the tax cuts we’re considering would go to businesses,” the Rubio-Lee dispatch says, “and only 30 percent to individuals.” This is a false choice—individuals earn income at businesses—and apes the left’s class-war politics.

There was never going to be justice for the American war dead of the Benghazi attack. The jihadist strike on the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities was too bound up in the politics of the 2012 presidential election. Moreover, the prosecution of the lone defendant charged in the attack was a product of the progressive ideological insistence that acts of war can seamlessly be downgraded into mere penal offenses, adjudicated with all the due-process strictures that implies.

This bull-headed conceit is a fiction, and thus the experiment is a failure.

It is not my purpose to make a competing “I told you so” claim that Ahmed Abu Khatallah should have been designated an enemy combatant and consigned to military detention and trial. Yesterday, after an eight-week trial in civilian federal court in Washington, Khatallah was acquitted on the most important charges against him — the charges that arose out of the murders of U.S. ambassador J. Christopher Stephens, State Department employee Sean Smith, and CIA security contractors Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods. Despite these 14 acquittals, he was convicted on four charges involving material support for terrorism, destruction of property, and carrying a firearm during a violent crime. There is no reason to believe that the outcome would have been more just — or even that we would have an outcome yet — had the case been assigned to the existing, deeply flawed military-commission system.

Instead, in positing two points, I want to restate a plea that we stop playing with fire and move beyond the deadening “military v. civilian” debate — Is it a war or is it a crime? — that has undermined American counterterrorism for 16 years.

Point One: The identification of our wartime enemy must be made with more precision — which is to say, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) under which we have been operating since October 2001 badly needs superseding. It is the AUMF that determines who can properly be regarded as an unlawful enemy combatant. Only unlawful enemy combatants may be detained, interrogated, and prosecuted outside the civilian justice system. It is not clear that the AUMF would have supported Khatallah’s designation as an enemy combatant, notwithstanding his murderous jihadist attack on U.S. government facilities. Part of that is because of the way the Obama administration distorted al-Qaeda, but another part is the increasing obsolescence of the AUMF.

At present, many if not most of the jihadist organizations we confront did not even exist when the AUMF was enacted (although most carry the DNA of al-Qaeda, as that network existed 16 years ago). The problem has long been obvious, even if we remain willfully blind to it: Our enemy is not a particular jihadist network; it is sharia-supremacist ideology, drawn from a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, which spawns virulently anti-American, anti-Western jihadist factions. The factions come and go, their names changing over time — al-Qaeda, ISIS, Ansar al-Sharia, al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb or in the Arabian Peninsula, and on and on. The constant is the ideology. It is what catalyzes the jihadists and knits their ever-evolving forces together.

We need a designation of the enemy that homes in on the ideology and brings within its sweep all these conforming groups. The current AUMF, to the contrary, is circumscribed by a long-ago event (9/11) and the entities (whether terrorist organizations or nations) that were complicit in it.

Point Two: To repeat what I have been arguing for over a dozen years, we need a national-security court. At the moment, we have two models for prosecuting enemy-combatant terrorists: the civilian justice system and the military-commission system. Neither one of them is a good fit. Khatallah’s case underscores the incurable deficiencies of civilian prosecution for acts of war that occur outside U.S. jurisdiction — as did the 2010 trial of Ahmed Ghailani, who was acquitted on 284 of the 285 terrorism counts arising out of his participation in al-Qaeda’s 1988 bombings of American embassies in eastern Africa. Yet, the military justice system is also inadequate to the task of addressing a non-traditional enemy who crisscrosses between the civilian sphere and combat operations.

As a Republican bill that would eliminate most of the state and local tax (SALT) deduction advances through Congress, it is prompting newfound concern from politicians and the media in high-tax states about the burdens their wealthy residents face. California governor Jerry Brown, who helped engineer a massive tax hike on his state’s richest residents in 2012, called the federal proposal to end the exemption for local taxes a “gross manipulation” of the tax code and an “attack” on his state—where 98 percent of households earning more than $1 million use the deduction (on average, claiming $462,000 in state and local taxes on their federal tax form). New York governor Andrew Cuomo labeled the reform a “scam,” though Democrats and Republicans have supported it over the years.

The New York Times, under a headline that urges readers to “take claims about the state and local deduction with a grain of salt,” rejected the principal Republican argument for eliminating the deduction: that it serves as a subsidy for high-tax states because it lets them keep their taxes high while giving their residents a break on federal taxes. Instead, the Times argued, states like New York send more money to Washington in taxes than they get back in federal spending, so residents deserve the federal deduction. “Saying Indiana subsidizes New York through the deduction ignores net revenue and spending,” the Times contends. Echoing that argument, Cuomo calls New York a “donor state” to the federal government.

Politicians from high-tax states like New York, California, and New Jersey have made this case for decades, dating back to when former New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan first began tracking taxes paid by residents of each state to Washington and comparing them with the amount of federal money flowing into each state. Others have continued Moynihan’s exercise, tracking these flows, but often in the most superficial ways, designed to create the illusion that some states are “dependent” on Washington because they get more than they send, while others are “donors” to the rest of the country.

Denzel isn’t just one of the most established black actors in Hollywood. He’s one of the most established actors, period. As such, he probably has the leeway to confront Hollywood’s enforced Leftism that most actors do not have.

In an interview, Washington told The Grio where positive change in the black community needs to start: “It starts in the home,” the actor said. He went on to argue:

If the father is not in the home the boy will find a father in the streets. I saw it in my generation and every generation before me, and every one since.

Washington isn’t talking about boys finding a literal father figure to guide them on the right path. He’s talking about the streets themselves raising kids, and that path is nothing but trouble:

If the streets raise you, then the judge becomes your mother and prison becomes your home.

Washington is right, of course. Next to slavery, the greatest sin committed by the Democratic Party was the destruction of the black family by LBJ’s supposed “War on Poverty.” It created a perverse financial incentive for America’s black population — the largest recipients of LBJ’s programs at the time, still poor due to Jim Crow laws just being abolished — to no longer live in family units. Many opted to ignore marriage, as single motherhood led to greater benefits.

A strong family — with a father and a mother — does wonders to prevent kids from following in the erstwhile footsteps of many of their peers. In fact, black kids being raised with a married mother and father overcome virtually all of the current differences in outcomes between races.

Denzel Washington clearly understands this. Too bad so many of our politicians don’t have the courage to point out the obvious.

Former FBI director Robert Mueller was supposed to run a narrow investigation into accusations of collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and the Russian government. But so far, Mueller’s work has been plagued by almost daily improper leaks (e.g., “sources report,” “it emerged,” “some say”) about investigations that seem to have little to do with his original mandate.

Now, there are leaks claiming that Mueller is going after former national-security adviser Michael Flynn for his business practices before he entered the Trump administration. Specifically, Mueller is reportedly investigating Flynn’s security assessment and intelligence work for the Turkish government and other Turkish interests. Yet possible unethical lobbying on behalf of a NATO ally was not the reason Mueller was appointed.

The Roman satirist Juvenal famously once asked how one could guard against marital infidelity when the moral guardians were themselves immoral. His famous quip, translated roughly as “Who will police the police?” is applicable to all supposedly saintly investigators.

Independent counsel Ken Starr was supposed to look into Bill Clinton’s supposed shady Whitewater dealings in Arkansas. He ended up investigating every aspect of Clinton’s life, including his many sexual escapades.

No doubt Clinton was a philanderer. But it was not Starr’s mission to prove to the nation what it had already suspected when it voted Clinton into the Oval Office.

In 2003, Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed as special counsel (by now-notorious former FBI director James Comey) to determine whether Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, had illegally exposed the allegedly covert status of CIA operative Valerie Plame. As with the Starr investigation, Fitzgerald soon presided over a media circus.

When the investigation was over, Libby was charged on five counts even though Plame may not have been a covert CIA agent at all. Also, it was reported early in the investigation that Fitzgerald knew that someone other than Libby (Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage) was almost surely guilty of first leaking Plame’s status.

But Fitzgerald was desperate for a big administration scalp. So he continued to lead an investigation that resulted in Libby’s conviction on four charges — in part based on Libby’s supposed disclosures to journalist Judith Miller. In her memoir, Miller later disavowed that Libby had ever given her classified information.

Special-counsel investigations are only as good as the society at large that orders them. The idea that a godly inquisitor, invested with extralegal authority, can somehow use superior wisdom and morality to solve an unsolvable ethical problem is a stretch.

Usually, these chasing-your-own-tail appointments are born out of media and political hysteria. The special counsel immediately feels enormous pressure to find anything to avoid being accused of running a “whitewash” or wasting time and money.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has become ground zero in President Trump’s fight to “drain the swamp” permeating the deep state in Washington, D.C. This bureau was created during the Obama administration under the draconian Dodd-Frank Act, with the purpose of regulating various financial products directly affecting consumers, such as mortgages, credit cards, bank accounts and student loans. Barack Obama’s pick to run the agency as its director was Richard Cordray, who used the unilateral powers of his office to browbeat financial institutions, large and small. Mr. Cordray resigned late last week. A duel broke out between two claimants for the position of “acting director” to fill the vacancy left by Mr. Cordray until President Trump nominates, and the Senate confirms, his successor as director. Mr. Cordray tried, just before his resignation, to install his own pick for acting director, while President Trump appointed Mick Mulvaney, someone he trusts to jump start immediately the changes he believes are necessary to place some reasonable constraints on the run-away, unaccountable regulatory bureaucracy. For the moment, a federal court has supported the authority of the Trump administration’s appointment, but the opposition is considering various options, including an appeal. While it’s doubtful an appeal will succeed, it doesn’t look like the Deep State is ready to concede this battle just yet.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was originally the idea of then-Professor and now-Senator Elizabeth Warren, who regularly attacks anything connected to the financial industry. To ostensibly protect the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from any political interference, Congress granted the bureau’s director extraordinary unilateral powers. It also decided to delegate to the Federal Reserve Congress’s constitutional authority to appropriate the funds to run the bureau.

Before resigning his post a week earlier than planned, Director Cordray sought to extend his bureau’s overbearing regulatory regime for as long as possible by handpicking his own “acting director” to replace him temporarily. He did this through the artifice of appointing a deputy director, Leandra English, just before his resignation took effect. He based his action on ambiguous language in the Dodd-Frank Act, which he claimed empowered his just-appointed deputy director to automatically take over as the “acting director” upon his departure.

President Trump promptly used his authority, as the head of the executive branch, under a provision of a separate statute dealing with the filling of temporary vacancies, to appoint his own acting director, Mick Mulvaney (who is also serving as the budget director). The president served notice that he would not allow the swamp to continue as is at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Nancy Pelosi’s head-spinning defense of her Democrat colleague, the credibly accused serial sexual predator John Conyers Jr., is throwing a spotlight on the appalling double-standard Democrats apply when their own are under fire.

Of course, it is axiomatic that the more important the politician being accused of sexual wrongdoing is to the left, the more creatively and vigorously left-wingers will defend him.

But in this new era of populism, Americans are demanding accountability for the powerful. Public revulsion over sex-related abuses is mowing down the powerful like blades of grass. Hollywood’s answer to Caligula, Democrat mega-donor Harvey Weinstein, was the first to fall, and new stories of rape and his otherwise farm animal-like behavior seem to come out hourly. It takes a lot for the money-hungry left-wingers at HBO to cancel a blockbuster series like “House of Cards,” but that’s exactly what they did after actor Kevin Spacey was credibly accused of trying to force himself on an underage boy years ago. The political career of that crazed frat-boy who can’t keep his hands to himself, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), is now hanging on by a thread as the trickle of loyal Democrats abandoning him is growing into a raging river.

Republicans and conservatives are no angels but hardly any have gotten caught up in this great awakening that began in the autumn. This helps to explain why mainstream media shrieking about unproven sexual misconduct allegations against President Trump and Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore in Alabama keeps growing louder.

Pelosi has put some distance between herself and the Michigan lawmaker since her Sunday appearance on “Meet the Press,” which was an unadulterated public relations debacle for the California congresswoman who serves as House minority leader. But her stunningly tone-deaf TV performance shows the normal rules still don’t apply to Democrat dinosaurs like Conyers, currently the longest-serving member in Congress. The TV spot has also done significant damage to the Democrats’ brand as the party that champions women.

Eighty-eight-year-old Conyers, who was first elected to Congress in 1964, is “an icon” who deserves due process and respect, Pelosi told a slack-jawed Chuck Todd.

“John Conyers is an icon in our country,” she said of the big-city Sixties radical. “He’s done a great deal to protect women,” Pelosi said, referencing his support for the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). Her laudatory remarks were promptly echoed by other Democrats in Congress.

Evidence suggests Conyers has also done a great deal to harm women, treating them like sexual playthings.

Conyers has acknowledged he settled a 2015 sexual harassment claim for $27,000 of taxpayer funds without admitting wrongdoing. He silenced his alleged victim by forcing her to sign a nondisclosure agreement. He has temporarily stepped down as ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee while he is being investigated.

Four other female Conyers employees signed affidavits saying he sexually harassed them.

In the 2015 case, Conyers settled with an ex-employee who claimed she was terminated for refusing to “succumb to [his] sexual advances.” Still bound by the nondisclosure agreement, the victim has reportedly asked for the prohibition on speaking publicly about what happened to be lifted.

According to apparently authentic redacted affidavits, the lawmaker “repeatedly made sexual advances to female staff that included requests for sexual favors, contacting and transporting other women with whom they believed Conyers was having affairs, caressing their hands sexually, and rubbing their legs and backs in public.”

“On the shores of her Cambridge mansion, by the shining Charles River waters, stood Elizabeth Warren, pointing with her finger at the White House.”
The Song of Warrenwatha

Senator Elizabeth Warren, America’s greatest living fake Indian, is outraged.

“There he was, at a ceremony to honor Native Americans,” the former Harvard Law prof, who claimed to be Native American on account of her grandfather’s high cheekbones, fumed, “And President Trump couldn’t even make it through a ceremony to honor these men without throwing in a racial slur.”

The “racial slur” was calling a woman who is as Indian as the pilgrims, Pocahontas.

Taunting an American Indian that way might be a racial slur. Taunting Warren that way doesn’t insult her race. The millionaire former asbestos lawyer is as white as cottage cheese. It insults her character. It reminds everyone that Warren is as much a fighter for the “little guy” as she was a Cherokee.

The Senator from the High Cheekbones Tribe of Harvard isn’t just a fake Indian. She’s a fake class warfare activist.

And a fake everything.

Warren was a Republican before she turned Socialist. Before she was fighting corporations, she was helping corporations deny compensation to asbestos victims. And before she was protesting the high cost of education, Harvard Law was paying her $350,000 to teach a single course. A multinational corporation owned by billionaires then gave her a $525,000 advance to tell her tale of rising from “poverty” to fight for ordinary people who don’t get their own chair funded by Wall Street lawyers.

It would take a heart of stone not to make Pocahontas jokes about a blue-eyed scam artist so shameless she passed herself off as Harvard Law School’s “first woman of color.” A grifter whose campaign tried to prove she was really Indian by citing the work of her cousin who wrote the ‘Pow Wow Chow’ cookbook containing such authentic Indian recipes as Cold Omelets with Crab Meat and Mexican Oatmeal Soup.

Unfortunately the Cold Omelets with Crab Meat recipe turned out to be plagiarized from the braves of the New York Times. Warren’s Cherokee claims are as fake as her outrage over being exposed as a liar.

There’s only one racist in this story. It’s Elizabeth Warren.