RUTHFULLY YOURS

An Army recruit starts off with a salary under $20,000. Thousands of active duty military personnel are on food stamps. Millions of veterans rely on them to feed their families and themselves.

That’s how we treat the best of us. Here’s how we treat the worst of us.

An NFL rookie’s minimum salary is $465,000. And the majority of NFL players are usually bankrupt a few years after retirement because they blew through most of their money. Dozens of NFL players are arrested every year on charges ranging from murder to rape to animal abuse.

2017 was a banner year for the NFL with three times as many arrests as last year.

Along with the usual drunk driving and disorderly conduct arrests, there were 7 arrests for assault/battery, 6 for drugs and 5 for domestic violence.

The Seattle Seahawks announced that they weren’t going to “participate in the national anthem” because of the “injustice that has plagued people of color in this country”. While they lost that game, they are one of the top ranked teams in arrests. Alongside the Los Angeles Rams, the Green Bay Packers and the New York Jets, all of whom showed some solidarity with the anti-American protests, these top NFL criminal teams have racked up arrests for domestic violence, drugs, DUI and assault and battery.

Is it any wonder they think the justice system is unfair? They’re criminals.

Broncos linebacker Brandon Marshall was one of the early players to reject the Anthem. The Broncos supported his actions. As his teams have supported him during nine domestic violence accusations.

Did any of the women he stabbed, punched or choked have any choice about taking a knee?

It’s no wonder that so many of the NFL’s millionaire scumbags are eager to join Colin Kaepernick’s protests against the justice system by degrading our anthem.

It’s because they’re criminals.

And it’s no wonder that the NFL stands behind its thugs. If a team can shrug at a 6’4 man beating a woman, what’s a little anti-American tantrum by a prize property that makes them millions of dollars?

The only question is why are the rest of us subsidizing it?

Rarely has an intelligence apparatus engaged in systematic lying—and chronic deceit about its lying—both during and even after its tenure. Yet the Obama Administration’s four top security and intelligence officials time and again engaged in untruth, as if peddling lies was part of their job descriptions.

So far none have been held accountable. https://amgreatness.com/2017/09/25/a-lying-quartet/
Those exemptions are likely because, in hubristic fashion, all four assumed their service to progressive noble agendas would justify any odious means felt necessary to achieve them.

In part their liberal credentials were seen as guarantees that the media either would ignore or excuse their dissimulation. And in part, untruth was innate to them as lifelong and now seasoned Washington bureaucrats. Their reasons to be in Washington were largely a quest for media exposure, government sinecures, revolving door profiteering, and maintaining a host of subordinate toadies at their service. A harsh assessment, perhaps—but lying to the American people earns them such disdain.
Politically Correct Deception

Former Obama United Nations ambassador and National Security Advisor Susan Rice was rarely credible in any of her major public statements. Her dissimulation bordered on the pathological. Indeed, it went beyond even the demands put upon her for partisan spinning.

On five occasions, Rice lied to the media that the murder of Americans in Benghazi, Libya by al-Qaida affiliated-terrorists was a result of spontaneous rioting—in response to an obscure, rogue, and right-wing Coptic filmmaker. She later attributed such dissimulation to a lack of information, when we now know that the truth of Benghazi—and the larger landscape of events that ensured something like a Benghazi—were only too known. The video was a canard.

Rice assured the nation that the AWOL and traitorous Bowe Bergdahl was a hostage taken during combat and had served nobly (“with honor and distinction”). In fact, the renegade Bergdahl likely was exchanged for terrorist prisoners for two reasons: one, to diminish the number of terrorists held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility as promised by Obama during his campaign, and two, to highlight the humanitarian skills of Barack Obama in bringing home an American “hero,” especially defined as one who was so loudly aware of his own country’s foibles.

Rice also assured the nation that her administration, through its diplomatic brilliance, had eliminated Bashar Assad’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. “We were able to get the Syrian government to voluntarily and verifiably give up its chemical-weapons stockpile,” she lied. That supposed coup was worth the price of inviting in the Russians to the Middle East after a 40-year hiatus. In fact, almost immediately after entering office, President Trump was forced to bomb Assad’s WMD depots to prevent Syria’s air force from dropping more nerve gas on civilians.

Susan Rice

Once House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) announced that key administration officials illegally might have unmasked and leaked the names of U.S. citizens on government intercepts connected to the Trump campaign and transition team, Rice issued a blanket denial (“I know nothing about this”). That assertion predictably was untrue, as Rice herself was forced to concede when she altered narratives to later justify rather than deny her role in such improper leaking.

Rice assured the nation there were no hidden side-deals in the Iran Deal, such as a prisoner-swap concession. “And we were very specific about the need not to link their fate to that of the negotiations, because we had no idea for certain whether negotiations would succeed or fail. We didn’t want to give the Iranians a bargaining chip to use against us in the negotiations,” she fibbed. In response, Americans knew almost immediately by her disavowals that there were quid pro quo hostage-prisoner trades that put the United States at a disadvantage.

Rice displayed an eerie habit of broadcasting her lies by preemptive denial that she was about to lie. In her case, the privileged Rice sometimes fell back on the boilerplate victimhood defense of racism and sexism. More likely, as with many Obama officials, she felt certain she could deceive with impunity out of contempt for the American non-elite and, like her associate Ben Rhodes, with full confidence in the obsequiousness and incompetence of the “know-nothing” media.

Boy Scout Sanctimonious Deception

Former FBI Director James Comey long ago lost his carefully crafted Boy Scout image of a truth-teller, buffeted in a sea of Washington deception. Like Rice, when Comey signals he cannot lie or that others are lying, we know that his own duplicity is forthcoming. The list of his untruths and unprofessionalism is growing, as continuous disclosures cannot be synced with either his congressional testimony or his public statements.

An NFL player is arrested, on average, every seven days.

Did you know, that as of this writing, it’s been 24 days since an NFL player was arrested? The odds that we would go that long in between player arrests are 25 to 1! In case you were wondering, there’s an entire website dedicated to tracking all the NFL players who have been arrested.

Oops. I just checked again. It’s now been zero days since an NFL player was arrested. Thanks, Los Angeles Ram Ethan Westbrooks! Westbrooks was arrested this weekend for speeding and being in possession of an unlicensed firearm. This is the second time in bracelets this year for Westbrooks, who was arrested in March on suspicion of domestic violence (the charges were later dropped).

According to NFLArrest.com, the record span between arrests is 65 days. The average span between player arrests is seven days. The site has been tracking player arrests since 2000 and has an interactive breakdown of all the data. You can track arrests by team, date, day of the week (unsurprisingly, Saturday is most popular), player position, or type of crime.

The NFL has been in the national spotlight for several years in relation to its personal conduct policy. High-profile cases involving domestic violence, in particular, have caused the NFL a great measure of embarrassment as the league has struggled to determine the appropriate level of punishment. According to its written policy:

The policy states that anyone associated with the NFL can be disciplined under this policy regardless of whether they are convicted of a crime. Players who have been arrested are routinely suspended by the league. It’s become almost routine to view the police blotter as a normal aspect of reporting on the NFL. CONTINUE AT SITE

Lee is famous for her depth of information and knowledge…. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas state that the Constitution is 400 years old. In other words, its writing would predate the Pilgrims.

In 1997, while on a trip to the Mars Pathfinder operations center in California, Jackson Lee asked if the Pathfinder had succeeded in taking a picture of the flag planted on Mars by Neil Armstrong in 1969.

In 2010 she opined ““Today, we have two Vietnams, side by side, North and South, exchanging and working.” Forgot that Vietnam was unified in 1975.

As Jonathan Strong, then of the Daily Caller documented in 2011, she constantly referred to one staff member as “You Stupid Mother f…er,” threw her cell phone at another and demanded to be chauffeured by car when travelling between House office buildings (which are connected by tunnels) and that staffers run to the supermarket at 2 a.m. to buy garlic supplements for her. rsk

— Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) took a knee on the floor of the House tonight during a special order by the Congressional Black Caucus focused on rooting out racism and defending the First Amendment.

“Someone had the lack of judgment to provoke the situation and call their mothers a name,” Jackson Lee said of President Trump using “son of a bitch” last week to refer to NFL players who knelt during the National Anthem in protest of racial injustice.

“I refuse to accept that as a standard of leadership for the highest office in the world — and even if you never understand it… if you think you’re playing to your base, if you’re not the unifier, we will continue to stand in the gap and racism is going to be under our foot,” she said. “And you know where else it’s going to be? It’s going to be under our knee. Because we in the Congressional Black Caucus have always stood for what is right… there is no basis in the First Amendment that says you cannot kneel on the National Anthem or in front of the flag.”

Jackson Lee challenged Trump to identify which players’ mothers, by using the SOB slur, he was calling bitches. “That is racism. You cannot deny it,” she said of the insult.

The congresswoman then knelt and continued her floor speech. “I kneel in honor of the First Amendment,” she said. “I kneel because the flag is a symbol for freedom. I kneel because I’m going to stand against racism. I kneel because I will stand with those young men [in the NFL] and I stand with our soldiers. And I’ll stand with America.”

CBC Chairman Cedric Richmond (D-La.) in a statement earlier today faulted NFL owners who issued statements in support of their players’ right to free speech without acknowledging why they protested. “While a few of these statements mentioned ‘social injustice,’ ‘racial divides,’ and ‘societal issues,’ none of them explicitly mentioned the reason why Mr. Kaepernick and many others (professional athletes, celebrities, elected officials, and citizens) are taking a knee during the National Anthem,” he said.

“They are taking a knee to protest police officers who kill unarmed African Americans – men and women, adults and children, parents and grandparents – with impunity. They are taking a knee to protest a justice system that says that being Black is enough reason for a police officer to fear for his or her life,” Richmond said. “Those words were missing from the statements I read despite the fact that 70 percent of NFL players are Black and many of them, as well as their family and friends, have experienced racial profiling by police that leaves too many unarmed African Americans injured or dead.”https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/2017/09/25/jackson-lee-kneels-congressional-speech-honor-first-amendment/

THANKS DPS….

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell attacked President Trump for showing a “lack of respect for the NFL” — regarding the president’s recent comments criticizing players for not standing during the national anthem — because it violated the “constitutional rights of our players,” referring to the First Amendment.

This comes from the same commissioner who threatened NFL players who wanted to honor both 9/11 victims and five police officers who were murdered in Dallas.

The Dallas Cowboys wanted to pay tribute to the five Dallas officers who were murdered at a Black Lives Matter protest on July 7, 2016. The Cowboys had been wearing a special decal on their helmets that said “Arm in Arm” that specifically honored the police officers — that is, until the NFL stepped in and stopped it.

“The NFL had an opportunity to be leaders and advocates for change in law enforcement,” Sgt. Demetrick Pennie, president of The Dallas Fallen Officer Foundation, told TMZ at the time. “These are our friends and our loved ones … it hurts to not have the NFL fully support us.”

Nationally syndicated conservative talk-radio host, Mark Levin, fumed over the decision by the NFL, calling it “embarrassing” and “disgraceful”:

Let me tell you why the NFL won’t do this. Anyone have a guess? I have a big guess: Because they don’t want any trouble from the leftists, from the Black Lives Matter crowd. I know exactly what’s going on here. Like Hillary Clinton doesn’t seek the endorsement from the cops union. Of course not. The Democrat Party’s gone. And the NFL top brass, like the NBA top brass, like baseball top brass, all liberal Democrats. [Every] damn one of them, pretty much.

Even more disgusting was the NFL’s response last September to players who wanted to honor the thousands of Americans who were murdered by Islamic terrorists on 9/11.

“Avery Williamson, a starting linebacker for the Tennessee team, hoped to wear a pair of specially-designed cleats at his team’s home opener Sunday against the Minnesota Vikings on the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, but he backed off when a league rep vowed to fine him for violating the league’s uniform code,” the New York Post reported.

An ancient Chinese philosopher once said, “May you live in interesting times.” Congratulations, we’ve hit the jackpot.

We are in the beginning phase of Obamagate. This is our generation’s Watergate. Except far worse.

Here’s a refresher course for those too young to remember. Watergate was the biggest scandal in modern political history. Republican President Richard Nixon desperately wanted to know what Democrats were planning for their 1972 presidential campaign against him. He ordered a team of trusted aides to spy on them. They literally broke into the offices of the Democrat National Committee inside the Watergate Building. That was the beginning of the end for Nixon.

But today no one needs to physically break into an office to spy on a political rival. All you have to do is use the high-tech electronic power of government. A corrupt president can use the government to listen in on anyone, anytime.

The media and liberal critics went ballistic when Donald Trump tweeted in March that Barack Obama spied on him. CNN tweeted, “Trump’s baseless wiretap claim” and, “Trump just flat-out lied about wiretapping.” Well guess who was right? Trump — again.

According to multiple media reports out last week, officials in the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign. They wiretapped Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort both before and after the election. It appears other top Trump aides were also wiretapped, as was Trump Tower.

If these media reports are proven true, then the Obama administration was spying on the entire Trump campaign staff. Even if they were listening in on only Manafort, to whom do you think he was speaking? Trump and every high-ranking member of Trump’s campaign staff.

Which means while government agents were supposedly listening for “criminal activity,” they just happened to hear every plan of the Trump campaign … they just happened to know what would be in Trump’s speeches … they knew his line of attack versus Hillary … they knew his debate prep … they knew everything Trump was planning before he did it. That’s some valuable inside information.

Obama just happened to pick the perfect guy to spy on — if he wanted to fix the election for Hillary.

If you want a perfect metaphor for our national moment, it’s Steelers offensive tackle Alejandro Villanueva coming out onto the field for the national anthem while the rest of his team stayed in the locker room.
Asked about it after the game, coach Mike Tomlin simply referred to an earlier statement on the reasoning for keeping the team in the locker room while the Star Spangled Banner played: he wanted the team to be unified in whatever it chose to do. “People shouldn’t have to choose,” Tomlin said. “If a guy wants to go about his normal business and participate in the anthem, he shouldn’t be forced to choose sides. If a guy feels the need to do something, he shouldn’t be separated from his teammate who chooses not to.” But as Villanueva seems to have recognized, staying in the locker room is not simply a neutral act; it is also a choice, of tribal loyalties over national ones.

Team unity is an admirable goal for a coach. But to secure that unity, he asked Villanueva, a West Pointer who served in Afghanistan, to refrain from publicly honoring a symbol of the larger team we’re all supposed to be a part of: the United States. The coach asked him to choose tribal unity over the national kind. It’s a false choice, but one that a lot of people are nonetheless being forced to make. And no matter what they choose, a lot of people end up angry.

Tomlin himself, of course, was clearly in a bad position. And I have sympathy for the players who put him there. I understand why people with a platform would want to use it to publicly express the feeling that a lot of black Americans have: that their country does not treat them as completely equal citizens, but as a caste apart.

Feeling like a citizen is more than being entitled to carry the passport abroad. If you are regularly stopped by police, demanding to know who you are and what you’re doing here, you are apt to feel like exiles in your own country. People who feel this way could view the country’s anthem as something less than a sacred expression of an inviolable national unity. Or perhaps they see it as embodying that ideal, of which our nation is falling short.

A lot of people don’t see it that way, however. Players refusing to offer a small symbolic honor to the country that has made them among the richest and most revered people in the history of humanity … well, to many ordinary fans who cannot dream of such status or wealth, it seems frankly ungrateful, and disrespectful to the legions of less exalted Americans who ultimately pay their salaries.

President Donald Trump was happy to capitalize on this also-understandable sentiment. In a series of tweets this weekend, he called for the players who won’t honor the anthem to be suspended or fired. Given what the players were protesting, such an attack inevitably has its own tribal overtones.

Trump was wrong to attack the NFL players; it is beneath the dignity of the U.S. presidency to bully individuals or groups. (Exceptions made for political figures who have volunteered for the fray.) It’s understandable that NFL players wanted to make as strong a counterattack as possible. Unfortunately, huddling in a locker room is not a very effective method of striking back at the president. If it was supposed to defuse the tension, it didn’t. Trump’s base is fired up over this conflict, their sympathies entirely with the president. And the mushy middle that such protests need to persuade are unlikely to be swayed by a refusal to honor the anthem.

To get those people on your side, you first need a common connection, a claim on their sympathy and support. Where does that claim come from? Appeals to universal moral values like justice and equality may feel more important, more virtuous, than mere patriotic symbolism. But the historical record indicates that however much people honor those virtues in theory, in practice they are unwilling to actually do much to secure justice and equality for distant strangers. No, to really move people to action you need a more primal, less abstract connection, which is to say, precisely the sort of sentiments of loyalty and solidarity that the anthem evokes.

Without them, we find ourselves where we are now: tribe against tribe, lofty ideals against gut patriotism. It’s a battle that both sides are losing, at immense cost.

New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, was elected with 73 percent of the vote, and on November 7 he’ll probably be reelected in a comparable landslide. On September 12 he faced token opposition in the Democratic primary, to be followed by token opposition in the general election. (Staten Island assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis is the GOP’s sacrificial lamb, while celebrity private detective Bo Dietl is running as an independent.)

Employment is up. Crime is down. The New York City economy and Wall Street are in bloom. In the grumbliest city in America, New Yorkers have little to kvetch about, except the trains, which, everyone knows, aren’t run out of City Hall. Yet in a fiercely progressive city, the progressive mayor’s approval rating hovers around 50 percent and has been underwater for much of his first term. In a City Hall that still rings with echoes of the footsteps of outsized personalities — Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Bloomberg — de Blasio barely makes a sound. No one credits him with engineering New York’s current state of ease. When the history of the period is written, he’ll be a footnote to the two-decade revolution that was the Giuliani–Bloomberg period. He’s a six-foot-five-inch dwarf.

Why doesn’t New York love Bill de Blasio?

It’s a question that preoccupies the mayor as he coasts to his second (and final, given term limits) stint in City Hall. “You’d assume they’d be having parades out in the streets,” he tells New York magazine.

Actually, New Yorkers are having parades out in the streets, such as the Puerto Rican Day parade, in which de Blasio marched behind a convicted terrorist, Oscar López Rivera, to whom the parade initially planned to give a place of honor. De Blasio initially said he would march behind López Rivera but then, after major sponsors, Governor Andrew Cuomo, and his own police commissioner dropped out, told reporters he had quietly been campaigning behind the scenes to get López Rivera dropped, calling the FALN separatist movement Rivera co-founded “mistaken from the beginning, because it used violence in the context of a democratic society, and that is not acceptable to me.” Then, after López Rivera announced he would not accept a ceremonial honor but would march at the head of the parade anyway, de Blasio joined him, albeit keeping his distance a few blocks behind.

That was pure de Blasio — allying himself with the most vicious and extreme elements of the Left, bumbling in an attempt to get himself out of a jam of his own creation, and coming off comically foolhardy and inept. The mayor whose big college experience was a trip to work for the Sandinistas in 1988, who toured the Soviet Union in 1983 and later honeymooned in Cuba, would love to turn New York into New Stalingrad. But he can’t figure out how to do it. So he settles for fuming about the ills of private property, luxury housing, and income inequality. The more he does so, the more he resembles background static in New York’s glorious cacophony — irritating but irrelevant.

“A wallflower. There is no sense of alpha male about him,” wrote Vanity Fair’s Bryan Burrough. This was in a sympathetic profile.

“He just didn’t have the stars lined up,” Al Sharpton, another fan, told the New York Times, as though already looking back on the man who becomes a lame duck on January 2.

In a Politico list of 18 hot mayors, de Blasio wasn’t even mentioned. The Times reported that he is such a nonentity that he has to wear a nametag at national conferences, even gatherings of mayors. The tallest man in most any room is somehow the most pathetic one in it, the Empire State gelding. Among his best-known and least New Yorky traits is a penchant for oversleeping, rendering him late to, for instance, a memorial service for victims of a plane crash and three different events on one St. Patrick’s Day, including a reception at Gracie Mansion — “his own house,” noted the Times with exasperated italics. Exhausted from his morning workouts, he has a habit of following up with naps in his office. The city that never sleeps has a narcoleptic chief.