RUTHFULLY YOURS

In Las Vegas, more than 50 people are dead, and perhaps hundreds of others have been injured, in the deadliest mass-shooting attack in American history. Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old Nevadan believed to be the lone gunman, fired upon attendees of the Route 91 Harvest music festival from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort across the street. He killed himself before police reached him.

As we begin to process what has happened, it is important to remember — as we have learned from too many of these incidents — that initial reports are often wrong. We must wait for investigators and responsible journalists to do their work before we can have a clear picture of what happened.

On that score, news reports this morning are already referring to this atrocity as a “terrorist attack.” And that was even before the Islamic State jihadist organization claimed responsibility for the attack, a claim that has just beenreported by the Washington Examiner. ISIS offered no proof of its assertions that Paddock was a recent convert to Islam and had carried out the massacre on the terror network’s behalf. Again, we cannot assess it until the investigation unfolds.

Clearly, Paddock did terrorize a community, particularly an event attended by 22,000 people, at least hundreds of whom he put in mortal peril.

Does that make him a terrorist? Let’s put the unverified ISIS claims aside. If Paddock was a lone gunman acting independently and not under the influence of any organization or ideology, the answer to the question may depend on which law we apply — the federal penal code or Nevada’s criminal law.

We’ve recently had occasion to consider federal terrorism law in connection with a discussion over whether the violent “Antifa” movement should be legally designated as a terrorist organization. Under the U.S. penal code (section 2331(5) of Title 18), a violent act meets the definition of “domestic terrorism” if the actor was seeking:

(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping.

Many (perhaps most) mass killings will meet this test. Plainly, shooting at a crowd is an act of intimidation. But as the word “coerce” (also in that first clause) implies, the federal terrorism statute speaks to intimidation or coercion of a civilian population toward some identifiable objective. This kind of intimidation is easy to make out when the aggressor is a jihadist, whether associated with an outfit such as ISIS or merely “inspired by” sharia-supremacist ideology (which seeks the imposition of sharia law and to force changes in American policy). Establishing such intimidation is also straightforward when a group with a radical political agenda, such as Antifa, is involved. It is more difficult, though, when we are dealing with a lone gunman.

The start of a new Supreme Court term is a good moment to note some under-reported news: President Trump is rapidly remaking the federal appellate and district courts, with highly qualified nominees who fulfill his campaign promise to pick “constitutional conservatives.”

The White House announced its eighth batch of judicial nominees on Thursday, including four excellent choices for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. They include a pair of Texans: Don Willett, who is now on the Texas Supreme Court and is well known for his witty Twitter feed; and James Ho, a Gibson, Dunn partner in Dallas who clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas and was Texas solicitor general.

The other two Fifth Circuit nominees have notable legal achievements to their credit. Stuart Duncan was solicitor general of Louisiana and general counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. He was counsel of record in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, the landmark 2014 decision allowing closely held companies to be exempt from regulations they object to on religious grounds.

Kurt Engelhardt is chief judge for the federal district court for eastern Louisiana. In 2013 he wrote a withering 129-page opinion documenting misconduct by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the U.S. Attorney in prosecuting New Orleans police. Prosecutors attempted to inflame the potential jury pool against the officers with prejudicial public comments, including the use of a fake name on the website of the Times-Picayune. Justice appealed, but Judge Engelhardt was upheld by the Fifth Circuit he will join if he’s confirmed.

The speed of the nominations and the quality of the nominees is a result of the close ties between White House judicial vetters and the Federalist Society that is a national clearinghouse for conservative legal talent. Judicial nominations are arguably the most successful part of the Trump Presidency.

By our count—and we may have missed a name or two—Mr. Trump has made 18 nominations to appellate courts, 39 to district courts and three to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. The Senate has confirmed only four for the appellate courts as Democrats use every possible delaying tactic. They’re even trying to disqualify Amy Coney Barrett, a nominee for the Seventh Circuit, because she’s an “orthodox Catholic,” as Senator Dick Durbin put it in a question at a Senate hearing.

With confirmation politics increasingly polarized, Mr. Trump and Republicans are wise to move quickly to take advantage of this moment of Senate and White House control. If Democrats take the Senate in 2018, Chuck Schumer will try to block the confirmation of any conservative nominee. Mr. Trump deserves more credit than he’s getting for his judicial-nominating operation.

Hurricane Katrina taught the Federal Emergency Management Agency some harsh lessons in 2005. FEMA used what it learned to prepare and respond better when Harvey and Irma hit the U.S. mainland earlier this year. Now Maria has taken the bureaucrats back to school in Puerto Rico, and they’re not getting passing grades.

Ahead of the Category 4 storm that hit with 155 mile-an-hour winds on Sept. 20, the FEMA team in Puerto Rico said it was ready. But a week later much of the island was still in dire need of food, water and fuel—the basics of humanitarian relief.

The most immediate needs centered on the sick and elderly. About 97% of the island lost electricity in the storm. Diesel-run generators were supposed to fill the void in hospitals and dialysis centers and provide refrigeration for medicines like insulin. But the diesel fuel did not arrive, and by midweek family members began to panic. Tearful Puerto Ricans begged for help.

FEMA will no doubt learn again from Maria. But so too should the rest of us, about the folly of relying on government to deal with a disaster even as predictable as the aftermath of a hurricane.

The only thing more certain than Maria’s devastation has been the rush to politicize it. As video of waist-deep water, washed out highways, splintered roofs, and uprooted trees scattered across the island hit American living rooms, Donald Trump’s adversaries and their media cheerleaders painted the president a heartless Anglo snob.

Yet the failures in Puerto Rico have not been due to a lack of federal attention. Rather the local FEMA team failed to execute fundamental aspects of emergency operations. Whether that’s because it was overwhelmed by the widespread devastation or because of bureaucratic incompetence can be debated. But efforts to chalk up the crisis to mainlander disregard for life are dishonest.

Mr. Trump’s big mistake has been his handling of the Jones Act, which mandates that shipping from the mainland to the island use only American-built-and-crewed vessels. First he said he would not suspend it as he did for Texas after Harvey and Florida after Irma. “A lot of people that work in the shipping industry . . . don’t want [it] lifted,” he said. Well, duh. A lot of people don’t like competition. But that’s hardly a good argument for blocking it.

Under pressure, he finally said he would suspend the Jones Act for Puerto Rico—but only for 10 days, a meaningless gesture.

For more than a week the island’s ports have been piled high with containers waiting to be hitched up to cabs and their contents delivered to supermarkets, restaurants, home-building supply stores and medical centers. In other words, much of the merchandise needed in an islandwide triage is already on Puerto Rican docks. CONTINUE AT SITE

I do not believe Trump made matters worse. Regarding the exhibition of contempt by NFL players during the playing of the national anthem, this puts me, quite unusually, at odds with a number of my friends and colleagues at National Review (Jonah Goldberg and David French, for example).

To my mind, to say that the president made things worse is to understate how bad things were — i.e., how appalling the fraud behind the kneeling protest has been. More damaging than anything Trump has said, moreover, is the indulgent reaction to the protest: The received wisdom that even if we find the tactic of the protesters objectionable, we owe them respectful attention because their cause — which they claim is racial equality — is an urgent and honorable one.

To the contrary, the protest promotes a false narrative. And we are not required to take at face value the protesters’ representation that they seek racial equality in the name of justice. Patently, what they are seeking is a perversion of justice based on racial inequality.

Furthermore, there is no First Amendment right to political speech in the workplace. Since the NFL is under no obligation to make its private platform a soapbox for promoting a false narrative — and particularly given that the NFL does not hesitate to suppress expression to which it objects — its decision to allow the exhibition of contempt for symbols of nationhood is a free choice, an implicit endorsement.

If the commissioner and the owners are now made uncomfortable because President Trump pointed out that they need not tolerate the exploitation of their forum by athletes who insult the nation and slander its police, good.

It is beyond cavil that the president’s impetuous remarks, his at times reckless and even offensive blathering, often make things worse, including for the president himself. To take just one example (there are numerous we could cite), his tweets accusing President Obama of tapping his Trump Tower phone lines were not just ill-informed and indecorous; they detracted from what may be a real political-spying scandal. They gave the media a rationale for focusing on Trump’s misstatements to the exclusion of indications that the Obama administration abused its foreign-intelligence collection power in order to monitor the opposition party’s presidential campaign.

But the spiteful public debate over the NFL’s kneeling protesters? He didn’t make that worse. He drew attention to its fraudulent underpinnings.

Wisconsin’s Green Bay Packers, who have a deep history of fan support through good times and bad, asked fans to join them in linking arms during the national anthem at last night’s home game against the Chicago Bears. Most fans refused.

While Packers and Bears players and coaches linked arms on the field, a plethora of little American flags popped up all over the stadium. Fans shouted “USA! USA!” while a large flag unfurled over the field. Local reports say some people even went farther in their displays of respect for the United States:

In the concourse, some people removed their hats as the anthem started to play, some stopped walking, some even saluted towards the TV’s displaying what was happening on the field, while crowds continued to move around them to get to their seat before kickoff. Some fans outside the stadium also stopped for the anthem.

Two days before the game, the Pack released a statement asking fans to join them in linking arms at this game to celebrate “diversity” and “justice”:

The image you will see on September 28th will be one of unity. It will represent a coming together of players who want the same things that all of us do—freedom, equality, tolerance, understanding, and justice for those who have been unjustly treated, discriminated against or otherwise treated unfairly. You will see the sons of police officers, kids who grew up in military families, people who have themselves experienced injustice and discrimination firsthand, and an array of others all linking together in a display of unity.

Those of us joining arms on Thursday will be different in so many ways, but one thing that binds us together is that we are all individuals who want to help make our society, our country and our world a better place. We believe that in diversity there can be UNI-versity.

At last Sunday’s game, during which an NFL-wide protest had been announced, several Packers players linked arms on the sidelines during the national anthem, while “Three players – veteran tight ends Martellus Bennett and Lance Kendricks, along with rookie cornerback Kevin King – sat on the bench during the anthem behind the rest of the team, all for different reasons.” Afterwards, the team decided to try this week for a unified display.

Canada dared call it treason.

American’s northern neighbor slammed the door on Chelsea (née Bradley) Manning when she tried to drive into Quebec last week. Canadian authorities blocked Manning “on grounds of serious criminality,” according to official records, “that would equate to an indictable offense, namely treason.”

Canada’s red light mocked the laurels and hearty welcomes offered to Manning since she waltzed out of the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth on May 17. Manning was feted like a conquering heroine in New York City’s gay-pride parade last June. This month’s Vogue magazine showcases Manning in a one-piece swimsuit, snapped by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. Manning will be a headliner at October’s New Yorker Festival. And Harvard recently named Manning a visiting fellow.

“She speaks on the social, technological and economic ramifications of Artificial Intelligence,” Harvard breathlessly announced. “As a trans woman, she advocates for queer and transgender rights as @xychelsea on Twitter.” Tragicomically, Harvard described Manning as “a Washington D.C. based network security expert.”

These plaudits are outrageous, given why Manning landed behind bars: In July 2013, Bradley Manning was convicted of 20 of 22 charges filed against him, including six violations of the Espionage Act of 1917.

Manning received “the stiffest punishment ever handed out in the U.S. for leaking to the media,” the Associated Press reported, “for spilling an unprecedented trove of government secrets.” This included “more than 700,000 classified military and diplomatic documents, plus battlefield footage, to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. By volume alone, it was the biggest leak of classified material in U.S. history, bigger even than the Pentagon Papers a generation ago.”

Manning was acquitted of “aiding the enemy.” Nonetheless, presiding judge Colonel Denise Lind ruled that Manning had “reason to believe the information could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” Further, Manning possessed “knowledge that intelligence published on the Internet was accessible to al Qaeda.” She added: “Manning’s conduct was of a heedless nature that made it actually and imminently dangerous to others. His conduct was both wanton and reckless.”

Despite these high crimes, Obama granted Manning clemency, thereby slashing her 35-year prison term to seven years already served. It’s inconceivable that Obama would have spared Manning 80 percent of her sentence were she still named Bradley.

All of this has given intelligence experts fits.

The Black Lives Matter fairy tale that police use black Americans for target practice took another hit as new FBI statistics showed the black homicide rate is skyrocketing and that cops had nothing to do with it.

Apart from the FBI data, four separate studies were published last year refuting the claim that police shootings are racially-biased, but facts often have little effect on committed left-wingers who hate America. Democrats, whose party officially endorsed the violent, subversive Black Lives Matter movement, won’t allow their bubbles to be burst by hard evidence, no matter how persuasive.

Although police, who are routinely demonized by left-wingers nowadays, don’t run extrajudicial anti-black death squads, as the radicals claim, the Left will no doubt find creative ways to dismiss the new FBI study.

“Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the police,” writes Heather Mac Donald, Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal.

The data in the FBI’s newly released official report on crime for 2016 undermines the virulently anti-cop rhetoric that is increasingly flowing from the mouths of overpaid, under-educated professional athletes who signal their contempt for America by kneeling during the playing of the national anthem.

Nearly 900 additional blacks were killed in 2016 compared with 2015, bringing the black homicide-victim total to 7,881. Those 7,881 “black bodies,” in the parlance of Ta-Nehisi Coates, are 1,305 more than the number of white victims (which in this case includes most Hispanics) for the same period, though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population.

The spike in black homicide deaths in 2016 comes after a previous 900-black-victim increase in 2015, she adds. Who killed these black victims? Mostly other blacks, she writes.

Comparatively few blacks were killed last year by police officers or whites. “Among all homicide suspects whose race was known, white killers of blacks numbered only 243,” Mac Donald writes. Police fatally shot 233 blacks, most of whom were armed and dangerous, as well as 16 unarmed black men, some of whom may have assaulted officers or offered violent resistance to arrest.

Mac Donald notes that in 2015 “a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer,” and that the 18.5 ratio no doubt worsened in 2016 “in light of the 53 percent increase in gun murders of officers—committed vastly and disproportionately by black males.”

Over the past decade, 42 percent of all cop-killers were black males, even though they constitute just 6 percent of the population.

Violent crime has been on the rise for two years in a row. The number of violent crimes went up 4.1 percent last year, while estimated homicides surged 8.6 percent. Violent crimes rose by almost 4 percent in 2015, while estimated homicides shot up almost 11 percent. The most recent period when violence rose two consecutive years was 2005-2006.

“The reason for the current increase is what I have called the Ferguson Effect,” she writes. “Cops are backing off of proactive policing in high-crime minority neighborhoods, and criminals are becoming emboldened.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The contempt for taxpayers is almost palpable here.