RUTHFULLY YOURS

One of the things that made “Disruptive Politics in the Trump Era,” John Fonte’s recent column for American Greatness, so provocative was his insight that the depredations of the Administrative State are indissolubly allied with what he calls “the cultural leviathan,” the progressive-left-dominated institutions that define the uplands of American social and political life. Many conservative commentators have lamented the Administrative State on Monday, the cultural Left (read: “leviathan”) on Tuesday without quite making the link that Fonte makes in his column.

A second thing that makes the essay worth pondering is Fonte’s inclusive anatomy of the beast that is the cultural leviathan. “Today,” he notes, “the facts on the ground tell us that the progressive Left dominates major institutions of American life: the universities, the mainstream media, the mainline churches, the entertainment industry, and the human resources departments of the Fortune 500.”

Bingo!

Any Tom, Dick, or Harry knows that the universities, the MSM, the mainline churches, and the entertainment industry are wholly owned subsidiaries of the Left. But it took a commentator of Fonte’s insight to roll corporate HR departments into the mix. No, it’s not an entirely original observation—I seem to recall that Heather Mac Donald, for example, has made similar arguments. But the synthesis, the articulation is arresting.

I had always sensed, without quite analyzing the feeling, that HR departments were the enemy. Fonte’s taxonomy afforded one of those “Eureka” moments that made Euclid’s bath so exciting. Of course! The Orwellian-named “human resources” department: of course it is a locus of politically correct, big-nurse imposition.

Like a suppurating orifice, the human resource department provides an ideal site for the multiplication of the bacterium politicus correctus. For one thing, such departments are always organized as top-down, unaccountable bureaucracies. HR departments are known for their arbitrariness masquerading under the rubric of “policy,” Wizard-of-Oz-like impersonality, and slavish conformity to faddish diktats promulgated as “best practices,” weenie speak for “do it my way.” In this sense, HR departments are like pseudopods of progressive government bureaucracies grafted onto the pliant stock of corporate timidity. It is not surprising, then, that HR departments tend to attract meddling and astringent personalities whose most cherished delight revolves around lording it over others.

‘Adam Andrzejewski, CEO of OpenTheBooks.com, as published at Forbes.’ Andrzejewski (say: Angie-eff-ski)

“It’s hard, when you’re up to your armpits in alligators, to remember you came here to drain the swamp.” – President Ronald Reagan (1983)

“What we have to do is drain the swamp in Washington, D.C.” – Rep. Nancy Pelosi (2006)

The Republican Congress and president argue it’s time to “drain the swamp” and cut spending. It’s not a new fight, but here’s why it’s so difficult: Our OpenTheBooks Oversight Report – Mapping the Swamp, A Study of the Administrative State describes the size, scope, and power of the federal bureaucracy.

Today’s federal bureaucrats are paid $1.1 million a minute, $66 million an hour, and over $524 million a day – and that’s just the cash compensation cost. Taxpayers also pay for lucrative perks like weeks of paid time-off, performance bonuses and padded retirement pensions.

Using our interactive mapping tool, quickly review the 2 million federal employee salaries and bonuses by ZIP code across America. Just click a pin and scroll down to see the results rendered in the chart beneath the map. See your local piece of the swamp: how much are the federal employees in your backyard earning? Which agency employs them, and what is their job title?

Here are a few of our key findings:

$136 Billion in Cash Compensation – The federal government disclosed 1.97 million employees across 122 independent agencies and departments. In FY2016, these 2 million workers received $136 billion in compensation. If we could factor in another 2 million undisclosed employees – at the Department of Defense and on active military and other agencies – the cost would be much higher.
$22.6 Billion in Time Off and Benefits – After just three years of public service, federal employees receive ten federal holidays, 13 sick days, and 20 vacation days per year. That is eight and a half weeks of paid time off (43 days per year). That benefit costs taxpayers an estimated $22.6 billion annually.
$1.5 Billion to Bonuses – The federal government awarded 330,713 bonuses for $351 million (FY2016). However, the federal union agreement bars the disclosure of the $1.1 billion in performance bonuses. So, who received how much? It’s time to open the books on the billion-dollar performance bonuses. The largest federal bonus last year ($141,525) didn’t go to a rocket scientist or a doctor researching a cancer cure; it went to Bart Ferrell, a Human Resources Manager in charge of processing payroll at the Presidio Trust. Ferrell’s total pay last year exceeded $300,000.
A Six-Figure Minimum Wage? In 78 large agencies, the average employee made more than $100,00. We found 30,000 bureaucrats out-earning every governor of the 50 states with salaries exceeding $190,000. The number of federal employees making $200,000 or more has skyrocketed by 165 percent during the past six years. ‘Diet and Nutrition’ employees can make up to $207,060; ‘Food Services’ workers in the prisons system can bring in $136,622; and ‘Laundry Operations’ employees at the VA can make $101,694. Even ‘photography’ is lucrative, averaging more than $80,000 with top pay reaching $157,971

Two cronies of Hillary Clinton donated more than half a million dollars to celebrity attorney Lisa Bloom’s effort to get women accusing Donald Trump of sexual harassment to step forward.

The New York Times reports that Susie Tompkins Buell, a major Hillary donor, and Democratic attack dog David Brock both gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Bloom, who was representing several of the women accusing Trump.

Fox News:

Susie Tompkins Buell, the founder of Esprit Clothing and a major Clinton campaign donor for many years, gave the money to celebrity lawyer Lisa Bloom who was working with a number of Trump accusers at the time, according to the paper’s bombshell report.

Bloom solicited donors by saying she was working with women who might “find the courage to speak out” against Trump if the donors would provide funds for security, relocation and possibly a “safe house,” the paper reported.

Former Clinton nemesis turned Clinton operative David Brock also donated $200,000 to the effort through a nonprofit group he founded, the paper reported in an article entitled, “Partisans, Wielding Money, Begin Seeking to Exploit Harassment Claims.”

Bloom told the Times that the effort was unproductive. One woman requested $2 million then decided not to come forward. Nor did any other women.

Bloom said she refunded most of the cash, keeping only some funds for out-of-pocket expenses accrued while working to vet and prepare cases.

The lawyer told the paper she did not communicate with Clinton or her campaign “on any of this.”

She also maintained that she represented only clients whose stories she had corroborated and disputed the premise that she offered money to coax clients to come forward, the paper reported.

As Donald Trump heads into his second year as President, we’re pleased to report that there hasn’t been a fascist coup in Washington. This must be terribly disappointing to the progressive elites who a year ago predicted an authoritarian America because Mr. Trump posed a unique threat to democratic norms. But it looks like the U.S. will have to settle for James Madison’s boring checks and balances.

“How to stop an autocracy,” said a Feb. 7, 2017 headline on Vox, ruminating on a zillion-word essay in The Atlantic on how Donald Trump might impose authoritarian rule. Academics and pundits mined analogies to Mussolini, Hitler and Vladimir Putin.

Four political scientists even formed something called Bright Line Watch—with the help of foundation money—to “monitor the status of democratic practices and highlight potential threats to American democracy.” Readers won’t be surprised to learn that the only graver threat than Mr. Trump is the Republican Congress that refuses to impeach him.

One of the Bright Line Watch founders, University of Rochester professor Gretchen Helmke, wrote in the Washington Post on April 25, “Could Trump set off a constitutional crisis? Here’s what we can learn from Latin America.”

A year later, where are we on the road to Venezuela?
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Far from rolling over Washington institutions like a tank, Mr. Trump seems as frustrated as other Presidents with the limits of his power. He achieved one major legislative goal in tax reform but failed on health care. His border wall isn’t built and he may have to legalize the “Dreamer” immigrants if he wants Congress to approve money for it.

Mr. Trump’s political appointees still aren’t close to fully staffing the executive branch. He’s making more headway on judges, but that’s partly due to former Democratic leader Harry Reid’s decision in 2013 to eliminate the Senate filibuster for judicial nominees. The press cheered on that partisan, mid-session change of Senate rules to pack the courts.

It’s only weeks away from the day in January last year when Donald J. Trump ascended to the presidency and took his oath of office as the 45th President of the United States of America.

In only 12 months, it’s fair to say that he has already had an extraordinary presidency—more bold, courageous, and revolutionary than any American president since the Founding Fathers almost two-and-a-half centuries ago.

I use the adjectives spectacular and extraordinary not only to describe the sheer ebullience and optimism the president exhibits every day at his impossibly daunting job—and in spite of the non-stop vilification of the angry, bitter, jealous left—but mostly because his accomplishments in both domestic and foreign affairs have been so stupendous for the American people.

Haven’t you been reading the papers and watching TV?” the pathetic Never Trumpers grouse. “If you had,” they insist, “you would have seen clearly that the president has had just about no accomplishments!”

Of course, if I depended on the media whores at CBS, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, CNN, and The Washington Post, The New York Times, National Public Radio (NPR)—the list is long—I would be forced to believe the avalanche of fake news which consistently fails to give even passing mention to the president’s laudable achievements.

But one of the genius things candidate Trump accomplished before he was elected and entered the Oval Office was identifying the colossal phoniness of the so-called mainstream media.

Jim Hoft, proprietor of Gateway Pundit reports that according to Wikileaks, at least 65 mainstream-media reporters met and coordinated with top Hillary Clinton advisors during the 2016 presidential campaign. Below is only a tiny sampling of what a friend of mine calls partisan prostitutes:

All of these shills worked closely with the Clinton campaign, were invited to top elitist dinners with Hillary Campaign Chairman John Podesta and Chief Campaign strategist Joel Benenson, and in every case were given an “off-the-record” agenda which was blatantly and fawningly pro-Hillary. NOTE: significantly, no fair-and-balanced Fox News reporters made the list.

For President Donald J. Trump, 2017 concludes unlike the way it commenced.

His commanding inaugural address soon became swamped by an enervating debate over the size of the crowd that had witnessed it. That national screaming match foreshadowed other huge distractions, including court battles concerning Trump’s travel restrictions on terror-torn nations, a Niagara Falls of classified leaks, and loud threats of impeachment over alleged Russian collusion. Meanwhile, repealing and replacing Obamacare, expected to take just a few months, devolved into a quagmire that devoured time, energy, and morale.

But 2017 ends as Trump’s Year of Winning Dangerously. The President of the United States has navigated these and other troubled waters and defied his critics — from Resist on the left to Never Trump on the right. As he puts it: “We are compiling a long and beautiful list” of achievements.

As Trump and Republicans gathered at the White House to celebrate passage of the Tax Cut and Jobs Act with overwhelming GOP support, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell announced: “This has been a year of extraordinary accomplishments for the Trump administration.”

While free traders and entitlement reformers could ask for more, nearly all of Trump’s triumphs are solidly conservative victories. Indeed, Trump has implemented policies over which the Right has fantasized for years, sometimes decades.

The $1.5 trillion Tax Cut and Jobs Act is the most significant tax-policy overhaul since 1986. On January 1, these conservative dreams will come true: a massive slash in the corporate tax (from a 35 percent rate to 21, thus reducing the business levy by 40 percent), repatriation of overseas profits, a territorial tax system, and immediate expensing of capital investments.

Beyond taxes, per se, TCJA also secures free-market priorities in energy, health care, and school choice.

TCJA permits petroleum development in 2,000 acres of the 19-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. While leaving literally 99.99 percent of ANWR untouched, the 0.01 percent available for drilling could yield up to 1.45 million barrels of oil daily, equal to 14.5 percent of current domestic production. The GOP has tried to unlock ANWR since 1979.

TCJA makes enrollment in Obamacare voluntary by scrapping the individual-coverage mandate. Those who want Obamacare may keep it, but never again will anyone be penalized for rejecting Obamacare. While this will not kill Obama’s disastrous monstrosity immediately, it shoves a shiv between its ribs. This is the GOP’s greatest progress in snuffing out Obamacare since 2010.

New Year’s Eve gets people thinking about resolutions. Alas, when a year passes, a mothballed prosecutor finds himself thinking about the statute of limitations. As 2018 beckons, it has me thinking about Paul Combetta — the Platte River Networks technician who used the “BleachBit” program to destroy thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails when they were under congressional subpoena and preservation orders.

It is not just the tick-tock of the criminal clock that has me thinking about Combetta — about how much longer his obstructive destruction of government files in March 2015 could still be subject to investigation and prosecution. The statute of limitations is five years. Time’s a-wastin’, but there could still be a live case for a while.

The other reason Combetta leaps to the front of the mind is . . . Robert Mueller.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein assures us that Special Counsel Mueller is doing a first-rate job probing the possible (but thus far undiscovered) complicity of Trump associates in Russia’s election meddling. That being the case, I’m wondering: Would the Trump Justice Department be up for applying Mueller’s approach to the Clinton caper?

No, I’m not suggesting that DOJ direct the FBI to break into Mr. Combetta’s home with guns drawn in the dead of night, as Mueller did with former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. I’d save the brass-knuckles tactics for hardened criminals, as the law intends. I’m talking about the aggressive but wholly legitimate step Mueller has taken: Calling BS on attempts by criminal suspects to use lawyers to conceal their schemes.

Back in November, we catalogued the stark contrasts between Mueller’s brand of hardball and the kid-gloves treatment given to subjects of the Clinton-emails investigation. The most significant of these involved the attorney–client privilege. Mueller persuaded a federal judge to force an attorney for Manafort and his co-defendant (Richard Gates) to testify against them in the grand jury.

Naturally, the defense attempted to rely on the attorney–client privilege to shield communications between the lawyer and the suspects from disclosure. But Mueller successfully countered that, under the crime-fraud exception to that privilege, communications are not deemed confidential if they are in furtherance of a crime, fraud, or civil wrong — which includes a scheme to dupe the government or undermine an investigation.

When the 2016 presidential election ended, the media somehow found the time to expose one of the greatest scandals of that or any other election cycle: active efforts of the Democratic National Committee favoring Hillary Clinton’s nomination and undermining the campaign of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Now it appears that former interim DNC Chairman Donna Brazile’s revelations about her party’s interference in the primaries may only have been a small taste of what really happened. The Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee may also have been part of a broad effort to undermine Trump that involved the FBI, the Department of Justice, intelligence agencies, and—irony of ironies!—Russian spies. This anti-Trump cabal has escaped public notice almost entirely, given the media’s obsession with the transparently false narrative of Trump-Russia collusion.

This is all the more reason why Attorney General Jeff Sessions needs to shine a light on this outrageous and potentially criminal conduct.

Although there are many indicators of election meddling on the part of the Left, the most important is the existence of the so-called Steele Dossier, a compilation of unflattering facts, pseudo-facts, and blatant fabrications designed to undermine the Presidential campaign of Donald Trump. The dossier was the work of British spy-for-hire Christopher Steele, paid for initially by anti-Trump conservatives. Later, the DNC and the Clinton campaign bankrolled Steele’s efforts, and the dossier, to the tune of millions of dollars. The dossier was shopped around to various media outlets, which, to their credit, mostly scoffed at its contents.

The FBI, however, took the dossier seriously enough to use it to begin an investigation of the Trump campaign and to obtain a warrant against Trump associate Carter Page. The FBI even offered to pay Steele to continue his work. And from where did the most salacious and bogus claims in the dossier come? Russian spies supplied these tidbits, in exchange for cash from Steele, who ultimately received funding from Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.

Now, opposition research is perfectly legitimate. Paying the agents of a foreign state to reveal and/or concoct damaging information about one’s political adversary, however, is manifestly unethical, and it remains an open question whether the Democrats or the Clinton campaign committed crimes in the course of their effort to discredit and defeat Trump. That the party which engaged in this outrageous behavior would then turn around and baselessly accuse its opponents of doing the same thing is, well, breathtaking in its audacity.

Trying to take Trump seriously, Michael’s Barone’s column in the Washington Examiner on Thursday, is significant for at least two reasons. One is that anything Barone writes is certain to be thoughtful, authoritatively researched, and grounded in reality. His columns, like his work in general, are not fired mainly by ideology but by a desire to understand. What Cardinal Newman said of Aristotle could, mutatis mutandis, be said of Barone: about most things, to think like him is to think correctly.https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/29/taking-trump-seriously/

But there is another sense in which this particular column is significant. Given Barone’s stature as a conservative but non-ideological commentator, his judicious and fair-minded assessment may mark a turning point in the broader public reception of President Trump’s initiatives.

Remember: the moment that Donald Trump achieved the impossible, defeating the anointed candidate Hillary Clinton, a vast coalition formed like a toxic mold to blight his presidency and deny him the legitimacy that he had won at the ballot box and the Electoral College.

Irony-free females in pink “pussy hats” marched in their thousands to protest against Trump’s “vulgarity”; B-list Hollywood narcissists made embarrassing videos in which they pleaded with members of the Electoral College to renege on their responsibility to vote for their party’s candidate; frenzied commentators at CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other outposts of woke hysteria regurgitated rumors, fantasies, innuendos, and gossip on the basis of “sources” indistinguishable from their personal political animus; black-masked members of Antifa and kindred covens of criminal disgruntlement rampaged on college campuses, destroying property and injuring people with whom they disagreed in order to protest the violence and intolerance of Donald Trump; the entire academic establishment, that sprawling congeries of preening though unearned smugness and moral self-infatuation, contracted in one brow of hate-spewing woe to demonstrate its unwavering commitment to sclerotic ideological conformity.

“The Embarrassing Ravings of a Mad Uncle”
All across the fruited plain, pampered members of the entitled class shouted at others to “check their privilege” while signaling their approval of a “resistance” movement whose only reality was a resistance to the results of a free, open, and democratic election. On the one hand, it was a perfect illustration of what Charles Mackay called “the madness of crowds”; on the other, it was a vivid embodiment of something Sigmund Freud might have congregated under the heading of “infantile neurosis.”

One of the nice things about being a writer in 2018 is that SJWs will continue to find new and absurd ways to get their feelings hurt. Even if nothing else is happening, I can always count on a group of SJWs providing me with something to write about. This time, a horde of them provided me a gift by taking to Twitter to express their dismay at a photo of chopsticks accompanying a New York Times story about a new Japanese restaurant.

The restaurant, called Jade Sixty, will be opening in NYC soon. The Times article reports that “a good portion of the menu at this new restaurant is pure New York steakhouse: nine cuts of beef, surf & turf, whole chicken and seafood platters. But the rest of the menu looks to Asia for inspiration, offering soup dumplings, chicken won tons, rock shrimp tempura, chicken yakitori, crispy spring rolls and a deep list of sushi specialties.”

Sounds delicious. And since my wife has an office in NYC, I look forward to sampling the menu.

In an attempt to help the soon-to-open restaurant spread the word, the New York Times included a photo of food accompanied by chopsticks. Apparently, the Times didn’t realize how important it is to get the chopsticks placement correct. They found out the hard way that the incorrect placement of chopsticks is racist. To be fair to the Times, I would bet that over 99.9 percent of the population wouldn’t have thought about it, either.

Predictably, HuffPost joined in the whining and smugly pointed out that “the chopstick photo is a reminder that the Times has been occasionally tone deaf towards Asian food and culture despite their ubiquity in New York City.”