RUTHFULLY YOURS

Shortly after Rand Paul was attacked by some man who people had previously never heard of, news media reported that the senator from Kentucky had suffered some “minor injuries.” Well, unless having potentially life-threatening injuries is now classified as “minor,” those initial reports were somewhat mistaken:

A senior adviser for Rand Paul says the U.S. senator is recovering from five broken ribs following an assault at his home. Doug Stafford said it is unclear when Paul will return to work since he is in considerable pain and has difficulty getting around, including flying. Stafford said Sunday that the broken ribs include three displaced fractures, which can lead to life-threatening injuries. The severe pain can last for weeks or months.

When those initial reports were published, the overall impression people got was that although it was shocking that someone had attacked Senator Paul, he didn’t suffer serious injuries. Clearly, he did. His attacker, Bernie Sanders supporter and Trump hater Rene Boucher, not only tried to do some real damage here but actually succeeded in doing so.

Following the horrendous attack on Republican congressmen and staffers during a baseball game earlier this year, which left Rep. Steve Scalise seriously wounded, this assault on Sen. Paul proves that the demonization of conservative politicians by the institutional Left is causing serious problems. Yes, political debate is important, but there’s a difference between debating issues and routinely vilifying those who dare disagree with you. Democrats and their friends in the media have repeated for years now that Republicans aren’t merely people “with other ideas,” but evil. They’re purposefully trying to hurt Average Joe, we’re being told. This message is driven home day after day, week after week. It was always only a matter of time before some wacko bird decided to take “justice” into his own hands by “removing the threat” Republicans pose to him, to minorities, and to society at large.

There’s only one way to end these kinds of attacks: by putting a halt to the complete vilification and demonization of “the other side.” Sadly, chances are the Democrats aren’t willing to do so. After all, they clearly believe that polarization will help them win elections. It’s about strategy to them, not about actual principles. CONTINUE AT SITE

The gunman who killed 26 people Sunday at a Texas church was discharged from the Air Force for bad conduct, according to court documents.

Authorities identified Devin Patrick Kelley, 26 years old, as the shooter. He was clad in black and wearing a ballistic vest when he opened fire at a Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, authorities said. Twenty people were injured in the attack.

Kelley fled the scene and was later found dead in his vehicle, police said. Police were investigating the circumstances of his death.

Kelley served in the U.S. Air Force but was court-martialed in 2012 and ultimately received a “bad conduct discharge,” according to court records. He was sentenced to confinement for 12 months and a reduction in rank to E-1.

Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek confirmed that Devin P. Kelley served in Logistics Readiness at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico from 2010 until his discharge in 2014.

Kelley was court-martialed in 2012 for two counts of assault on his spouse and on their child, Ms. Stefanek said.

Kelley lived in lived in the New Braunfels, Texas, area northeast of San Antonio, where he graduated from high school in 2009.

SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Texas—A young man clad in black and wearing a ballistic vest blasted his way into a Baptist church in this south Texas town on Sunday with an assault-type rifle, leaving at least 26 people dead and 20 others injured.

The gunman fled in a vehicle and died following a pursuit, law-enforcement officials said, adding that it wasn’t known whether he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound or was shot by someone else. Wilson County Commissioner Ernest “Skip” Hajek confirmed his identity as Devin Patrick Kelley. He said Kelley lived in the New Braunfels, Texas, area northeast of San Antonio.

Among those killed were a woman in the third trimester of her pregnancy and the 14-year-old daughter of Pastor Frank Pomeroy, according to family members of the victims. Twenty-three people were killed at the church, two outside and one died en route to the hospital, officials said.

For the future of medicine and treatment of infections, it is scary news. A pair of scientists, Catriona Harkins and Matthew Holden at the University of St. Andrews, have now determined bacteria can evolve resistance to antibiotics that the bacteria has never seen or interacted with.

According to an article in The Atlantic, the duo sequenced the DNA of 209 samples of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, that were collected between 1960 and 1989. They discovered that “methicillin use was not the original driving factor in the evolution of MRSA as previously thought.” Instead, it was penicillin. According to the research, when penicillin became popular, it likely helped the rise of staph strains that carried mecA, and were already resistant to methicillin.

This revelation makes MRSA even more frightening than previously thought. In 1959, Margaret Patricia Jevons had isolated three strains of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, which has since become a global problem. The bacteria had become a cautionary tale for how quickly bacteria can quickly evolve to resist popular drugs, especially when overprescribed.

But a few questions remained. MRSA appeared in India and some Eastern European countries before the countries had started using the antibiotic methicillin. So how did the bacteria evolve to resist a drug it had never encountered before?

This new study provides an answer, and many new consequences. According to MRSA researcher Hsu Li Yang, from the National University of Singapore, it demonstrates that “antibiotic resistance is a web of unintended consequences, rather than a simplistic cause-effect model that we often find (too much) comfort in.” Read https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/bacteria-can-evolve-resistance-to-drugs-before-those-drugs-are-used/544355/

It’s always important to understand how you know what you know, or what you think you know. It’s particularly important in the case of the Trump dossier.

Consider the increasing number of claims that the incendiary allegations of the dossier “check out,” in the words of New York Times columnist Bret Stephens.

Bankrolled by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC, guided by the dirt-digging opposition research firm Fusion GPS, and compiled by the former British spy Christopher Steele, the dossier’s key allegation is this: “There was a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between [the Trump campaign] and the Russian leadership.” Steele attributed that claim to “Source E,” whom he described as “an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.”

“What’s relevant is [Steele’s] credibility, the reliability of his sources and the truthfulness of their claims,” Stephens wrote recently. “These check out.”

But do they? In reality, most reasonable people not named Mueller would have to say we don’t know.

“As it relates to the Steele dossier, unfortunately the committee has hit a wall,” Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr noted last month. The committee’s investigation, the best probe outside of the Mueller special prosecutor operation, has not even been able to discover who Steele’s sources were, Burr said.

So how do outsiders conclude that the document’s key allegations check out? How do they know what they know?

Consider one of the dossier’s underlying claims in support of the “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump and the Russians. In a section of the dossier dated July 19, 2016, Steele wrote Carter Page, who was briefly on Trump’s little-used foreign policy advisory team, held secret meetings with two high-ranking Russians, one in the Putin government and one the head of Rosneft, the state-owned oil company, during a visit to Moscow early in the month of July. Here are the relevant portions of the dossier, written in spy style, from the July 19 Steele memo:

Speaking in July 2016, a Russian source close to Rosneft President, PUTIN close associate and US-sanctioned individual, Igor SECHIN, confided the details of a recent secret meeting between him and visiting Foreign Affairs Advisor to Republican presidential candidate Donald TRUMP, Carter PAGE.
According to SECHIN’s associate, the Rosneft President (CEO) had raised with PAGE the issues of future bilateral energy cooperation and prospects for an associated move to lift Ukraine-related Western sanctions against Russia. PAGE had reacted positively to this demarche by SECHIN but had been generally non-committal in his response.
Speaking separately, also in July 2016, an official close to Presidential Administration Head, S. IVANOV, confided in a compatriot that a senior colleague in the Internal Department of the PA, DIVYEKIN (nfd) also had met secretly with PAGE on his recent visit. Their agenda had included DIVYEKIN raising a dossier of ‘kompromat’ the Kremlin possessed on TRUMP’s Democratic presidential rival, Hillary CLINTON, and its possible release to the Republican’s campaign team.

In multiple embassies around the world, particularly those staffed entirely by career Foreign Service officers, no portrait of President Trump or Vice President Pence has been hung. Up until last week, the swamp had an excuse – there was no official portrait and the swamp refused to go to the trouble to find unofficial ones.

But it’s not just the entrances to embassies where it seems the 2016 election never happened. All throughout the government, Obama holdovers who rabidly oppose President Trump and his policies still hold positions of extraordinary power. The swamp is alive and well.

Consider the National Security Council, where Fernando Cutz is enabling Trump’s most mortal enemies – George Soros and the globalist Left – to threaten to topple the pro-American government of one of America’s closest allies, Guatemala.

Cutz is the director of South American policy at the National Security Council. He is a graduate of the Clinton School of Public Service, managed Obama’s cozying up to the Communists in Cuba, was on the Obama National Security Council staff in the “global engagement” office, and is a committed swamp creature of the foreign service genus.

Back to Guatemala. George Soros money and United Nations officials are attempting to use an activist leftist “Constitutional Court” in Guatemala to undermine, and perhaps ultimately remove, President Jimmy Morales. One effect of this judicial coup is to impair the rights of American mining interests in the country. The Guatemalan government has been very helpful in stemming human trafficking and drugs that ultimately wind up in the United States.

Instead of defending American interests and the Guatemalan government against coordinated Soros-driven attacks, the American embassy, with Cutz’s support and oversight, has enabled it. Cutz controls the information flow to Trump loyalists. A maelstrom of swamp bureaucrats at State are in full agreement.

The irony is thick. Soros money and international leftists are Trump’s most mortal political foes at home, while abroad the same gang is seeking to undermine one of America’s strongest allies, and yet a man who enables this Soros agenda — Cutz — works in the National Security Council.

CNN parted ways with political commentator Donna Brazile after leaked e-mails demonstrated what appeared to be improper collusion with Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Donna Brazile was fired from CNN after leaked e-mails suggested she used her position to pass information to the Clinton campaign about upcoming appearances.Veteran Democratic operative Donna Brazile finally admitted that she used her former position as a CNN commentator to relay questions ahead of debates to Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary.

For months, Brazile has avoided confirming that hacked emails from the campaign showed her forwarding the questions, which were asked at separate debates. But in a new essay for Time magazine looking back on the hackings, she said it was true.

WASHINGTON—Democrats became embroiled in an intraparty fight Friday over last year’s presidential election.

Donna Brazile, the interim chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee during the election, asserted in a new book that the fundraising agreement between the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign was unethical because it gave her too much influence on the party’s infrastructure.

In excerpts published on Politico, Ms. Brazile said Mrs. Clinton’s campaign raised money for the DNC and helped fund it, and in return took control of its finances and strategy as well as the funds. Ms. Brazile noted that it is common practice for a presidential nominee to take control of his or her party’s operations and fundraising.

But she said Mrs. Clinton’s campaign signed the agreement with the DNC in August 2015, almost a year before she clinched the party’s nomination. That disadvantaged Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in his primary fight with Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Brazile wrote.

Late Friday, Mrs. Clinton’s supporters pointed to a memo obtained by NBC News that said the agreement related only to the general election.

“Enough of this. If you’re a Democrat, we have things to do,” wrote Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman, Nick Merrill, in a Twitter message referencing the reported memo.

WSJ’s Gerald F. Seib explains what have we learned after Special Counsel Robert Mueller unveiled his first two big actions in his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Photo: Getty

DNC Communications Director Xochitl Hinojosa said in a statement Friday morning that “there shouldn’t even be a perception that the DNC is interfering” in the primary process. She noted that both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders had the option to raise money through joint DNC accounts.

The two campaigns set up joint fundraising accounts with the DNC during the Democratic primary, though the accounts were ultimately used very differently. Joint fundraising accounts allow campaigns and parties to solicit larger individual donations that are then divvied up between the entities that sign the agreement.

Mr. Sanders shunned big-dollar fundraising, relying instead on small donors to fuel his campaign. Mrs. Clinton, however, routinely held large-dollar fundraisers for her joint account with the DNC and state parties—some of which would then transfer the funds they received back to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. CONTINUE AT SITE

Robert E. Lee is back in the news thanks to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. In a Fox News interview Monday, Mr. Kelly called Gen. Lee “an honorable man” and observed that “men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had made them stand.”

Mr. Kelly has a point. It is worth remembering that Lee, who has lately been painted as a traitorous caricature, embodied in countless ways the poignancy and tragedy of the Civil War. It would be a gross misfortune if the political debate obscures his story.

Lee’s lineage was impeccable. His father was Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee III, the celebrated Revolutionary War general and close friend of George Washington. Lee himself descended from two signers of the Declaration of Independence, and his wife, who later became an ardent Confederate, was none other than Mary Custis, a great-granddaughter of Martha Washington and, through adoption, of George Washington himself.

Lee agonized over whether to fight for the Confederacy. As war loomed, Abraham Lincoln offered him command of the new Union Army, a position he had always coveted. Despite being an avowed Federalist who longed for compromise to save the Union, Lee, like so many others, gave in to the permanency of birth and blood. “I cannot raise my hand against my birthplace, my home, my children,” he wrote a friend, “save in defense of my native state.” Instead he became the commanding general of the Confederate armies, while predicting that the country would pass “through a terrible ordeal.” He was right.

Still, he was never much of a hater. Like Lincoln, more often than not Lee called the other side “those people,” rather than “the enemy.” Nor was it clear that he loved war itself. “It is well that war is so terrible,” he once said, “or we should grow too fond of it.” With words that could have been uttered by Lincoln, Lee talked of the cruelty of war, how it filled “our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors.”

Nor was he fond of slavery, once describing it as “a moral and political evil.” True, he did benefit from slavery. But in 1863, one day after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, Lee went a step further than Thomas Jefferson ever did and freed his family slaves, fulfilling the wishes of his father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis. And in 1865, as the Confederacy stood on the throes of destruction, Lee supported a dramatic measure to put slaves in uniform and train them to fight, which would have effectively emancipated them.

Upon the conflict’s close, Lee gave a forceful interview to the New York Herald in which he strongly condemned Lincoln’s assassination and claimed that the “best men of the South” had long wanted to see slavery’s end. Later he declared, “I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished.”

Arguably his most powerful statement about race relations came at war’s end in St. Paul’s Church, the congregation of the Richmond elite. To the horror of many of the congregants, a well-dressed black man advanced to take communion, and knelt down at the altar rail. The minister froze, unsure what to do. Lee knelt down next to the black man to partake of the communion with him.

Finally, Lee’s greatest legacy was not in war, but in peace. Lee went to great pains to heal the bitterness that cleaved the country after Appomattox. When Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, in arguably one of the most moving scenes in American history, the military situation remained quite perilous. The war was still raging. Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, was on the run, calling on Southerners to take to the hills and wage guerrilla warfare. This at a time when there were still three Confederate armies, and hatreds between North and South were at their peak. Lincoln was assassinated five days later. Had the South undertaken guerrilla warfare, it’s more than likely the U.S. would have broken up into two countries.

Clinton: There Is A Difference Between Paying For Trump Dossier And “Collusion” With Russia

On Wednesday’s broadcast of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, Hillary Clinton told host Trevor Noah that there is a difference between the Clinton campaign and the DNC working together to obtain the infamous Russian-tainted Trump dossier and the possibility that “Trump’s people” worked with Russians…

Sen. Warren: “Yes,” The Democratic Presidential Primary Was Rigged For Hillary Clinton

On Thursday’s broadcast of The Lead, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) told CNN host Jake Tapper she believes that the 2016 Democratic presidential primary was rigged in favor of the party’s eventual nominee Hillary Clinton. JAKE TAPPER: I want to ask you one other question, Senator, we learned…
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard: “The DNC Needs To Be Completely Overhauled… No More Games, No More Retaliation”

TULSI GABBARD: Earlier today we heard from Donna Brazile that what many people had suspected for a long time turned out to be true. The DNC secretly chose their nominee over a year before the primary elections even occurred.

This shines a light on how deeply broken the campaign finance laws are — and how they have weakened individual candidates while strengthening and empowering political parties and special interests.

These laws essentially allowed the Clinton campaign to bypass individual campaign contribution limits by funneling millions of dollars through the DNC and state parties — taking control of the DNC in the process.

Along with the recent retaliatory purge of Bernie Sanders and Keith Ellison supporters from the DNC’s executive committee, this is just further evidence that the DNC needs to be completely overhauled, to take our party back from the special interests and the powerful few, and put it back in the hands of the people.

We must bring about real campaign finance reform. We must get rid of the undemocratic system of superdelegates. We must implement instant or same-day registration in Democratic primaries, and actually encourage voter engagement.