RUTHFULLY YOURS

More non-news on the Russia-collusion front came Wednesday, when the Senate Intelligence Committee said it has now verified what everyone knew nine months ago: Russia worked to sow chaos during the 2016 election; vote totals weren’t affected; and no evidence has emerged that Donald Trump was in cahoots with Moscow.

But in the more distant, less camera-filled corners of Washington, there actually is some interesting new information. It centers on the document that increasingly looks central to the “chaos” Russia sowed: the Trump dossier.

That was the infamous list of accusations compiled starting in the summer of 2016 by a former British spook, Christopher Steele, who had been hired by the liberal opposition-research firm Fusion GPS. The discredited rumors about Mr. Trump came from anonymous Russian sources. This is notable, since it turns out Fusion was separately—or maybe not so separately—working with entities tied to the Kremlin.

How close was Fusion’s leader, Glenn Simpson, to Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Kremlin-linked lawyer? Did the Russians know about the dossier all along and help plant the information in it? Were American law-enforcement agencies relying on Russian-directed disinformation when they obtained secret warrants against Trump associates? Chaos, indeed.

Witness how hard the Federal Bureau of Investigation is fighting to avoid divulging any information about the dossier. More than a month ago the House Intelligence Committee issued subpoenas to the FBI and the Justice Department, asking for dossier-related documents. Lawmakers were told to go swivel.

A little more than a week ago, the committee’s frustrated chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, took the case all the way to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who finally offered to make an FBI official available for a briefing. But the bureau is still withholding all documents. To date, Sen. Chuck Grassley’s Judiciary Committee has not received any paper from the FBI on Russia matters, despite numerous requests, some countersigned by the Democratic ranking member, Dianne Feinstein.

Increasingly, one name is popping up: Gregory Brower, who leads the FBI’s Office of Congressional Affairs. Mr. Brower is an odd man for the job. These gigs tend to go to more-junior people, since they involve the drudgery of answering calls from grumpy congressional staffers. Yet Mr. Brower is a former U.S. attorney—a job that requires Senate confirmation—and a former Nevada state senator.

Before his latest role, he was the deputy general counsel of the FBI. In that post he was described as a confidant of former FBI Director James Comey. It was Mr. Comey who installed Mr. Brower in the congressional affairs job, just a few days before President Trump fired the director.

Mr. Brower has been shutting down congressional requests and stonewalling ever since. He has even tried appealing directly to House Speaker Paul Ryan’s office to squelch committee demands for documents. The FBI keeps justifying its intransigence by saying it doesn’t want to interfere with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. But Mr. Grassley recently announced that Mr. Mueller’s separate inquiry would no longer be considered a legitimate reason for the FBI to withhold information from Congress.

Now here’s the surprise: Reuters reported Wednesday that Mr. Mueller “has taken over FBI inquiries into a former British spy’s dossier” against Mr. Trump. How very convenient. The Mueller team has leaked all manner of details from its probe, even as it had avoided the dossier. But just as Congress is ratcheting up pressure on the FBI, anonymous sources say that it’s out of the bureau’s hands. CONTINUE AT SITE

(1) Everything Kills — “Guns are uniquely lethal.”

Last year, a Muslim terrorist with a truck killed 86 people and wounded another 458.

Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, the Tunisian Muslim killer, had brought along a gun, but it proved largely ineffective. The deadliest weapon of the delivery driver was a truck. Mohammed, who was no genius, used it to kill more people than Stephen Paddock would with all his meticulous planning in Vegas.

Do we need truck control?

Deadlier than the truck is the jet plane. Nearly 3,000 people were killed on September 11 by terrorists with a plan and some box cutters. And then there are always the bombs.

The Boston Marathon bomber wounded 264, a suicide bomber at the Manchester Arena last year wounded 250 and the Oklahoma City Bombing (the only non-Islamic terror attack on the list) killed 168 and wounded 680. Paddock was also stockpiling explosive compounds. If he hadn’t been able to get his hands on firearms, he would have deployed bombs. And potentially killed even more people.

We know how many people Paddock was able to kill with firearms. We don’t know how many people he would have been able to murder with a truck or with explosives.

The mass killer who most ominously resembles Paddock was Francisco Gonzales: a Filipino with financial problems who shot the pilot and co-pilot on a gambler’s special flight from Reno. Back in Reno, Gonzales had told a casino worker that it wouldn’t matter how much he lost. The plane went down with everyone on board. Gonzales had a gun, but his actual murder weapon was a plane.

Guns are not uniquely lethal. We live in a world filled with extremely lethal objects from chemical compounds to big trucks. We can license and regulate some things. But we can’t regulate everything.

(2) America Isn’t Unique — “This is the only country where this happens.”

That’s the leftist meme deployed after the Vegas shooting. But Paddock’s death toll narrowly edges out that of South Korea’s rampage killer Woo Bum-kon who murdered 56 people. America is not the only country where rampage killers operate. And their attacks have nothing to do with the racist construct of “white privilege”. It’s the leftist conviction that America is uniquely evil that accounts for the myth.

Seung-Hui Cho, one of this country’s worst rampage killers who murdered 32 people at Virginia Tech, was South Korean.

But the worst rampage killer in South Korea didn’t use a gun. He set a train on fire.

Kim Dae-han, a paralyzed middle aged man, started a subway fire that killed 192 people and wounded 150 others.

Republican senators Mike Lee (R., Utah) and John McCain (R., Ariz.) have introduced legislation to permanently exempt Puerto Rico from the Jones Act. This is a common-sense decision on the merits that will help the island recover from Hurricane Maria. It might also be a way for Republicans, who have so far been an inert governing party, to refresh their legislative agenda.

The Jones Act, passed after World War I, requires that shipping between U.S. ports be conducted with American-made ships that are staffed by American crews. The Jones Act prevented foreign vessels from delivering aid to Puerto Rico in the wake of the hurricane. Waiving it was an obvious move, and after hesitating, the Trump administration granted a waiver last week. That was a good decision at the time, but the legislation of Lee and McCain is a warranted next step.

On the merits, the Jones Act is a bad law. It cost Puerto Rico $17 billion in economic growth between 1990 and 2010, according to one economist’s estimate, and costs Hawaii and Alaska, too. It raises the cost of consumer goods, which particularly hurts poor consumers. All of this is to protect the interests of the American shipping industry, which lobbies ferociously. A full repeal of the act would be best, but McCain and Lee are right to try to pass a permanent exemption for Puerto Rico.

But the law could also chart a path forward for the Republican party, which is currently wedded to a stale agenda. In a Washington Monthly article titled “Why the Jones Act Is Robin Hood in Reverse,” political scientists Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles describe the legislation as an example of “regressive regulation” and rent-seeking:

The people who benefit from the regulation have big economic stakes on the line, while those who pay the costs may not even notice the effect on their individual well-being. This is true even though those costs may add up, across the whole economy, to billions of dollars, well in excess of what the beneficiaries take home.

According to Lindsey and Teles, authors of the forthcoming The Captured Economy, such regulations “generate economic inefficiency” and also “exacerbate the trends in the economy” that generate income inequality. Poor consumers in Puerto Rico and Hawaii lose; politically connected shipping interests win. Lee and McCain’s bill, then, is the kind of regulatory reform that will help regular consumers.

Regular consumers in Puerto Rico, that is. The natural disaster occasioned the Republican proposal, but it might be wishful thinking to cast this bill as a first step toward enacting a broader middle-class agenda. Yet increasingly, it’s middle-class Americans who vote Republican; Republicans could better serve their interests.

So far, they haven’t. House Republicans first passed a health-care plan that financed tax cuts for the wealthy with cuts to Medicaid, then Senate Republicans failed to shepherd through more modest health-care reforms, and now the GOP is tinkering with a tax-reform framework that doesn’t do enough to help middle-class families, as Ramesh Ponnuru has argued. It’s worth asking how long this can go on, especially given the schism, laid bare by Trump, between the party’s donor class and its base. Party leadership has remained studiously opposed to fresh thinking, but if Republicans want to maintain power, they will eventually have to pass legislation and govern.

The National Football League is a glass house that was cracking well before Donald Trump’s criticism of players who refuse to stand during the national anthem.

The NFL earned an estimated $14 billion last year. But 500-channel television, Internet live streaming, video games, and all sorts of other televised sports have combined to threaten the league’s monopoly on weekend entertainment — even before recent controversies.

It has become a fad for many players not to stand for the anthem. But it is also becoming a trend for irate fans not to watch the NFL at all.

Multimillionaire young players, mostly in their 20s, often cannot quite explain why they have become so furious at emblems of the country in which they are doing so well.

Their gripes at best seem episodic and are often without supporting data. Are they mad at supposedly inordinate police brutality toward black citizens, or racial disparity caused by bias, or the perceived vulgarity of President Donald Trump?

The result, fairly or not, is that a lot of viewers do not understand why so many young, rich players show such disrespect for their country — and, by extension, insult their far poorer fans, whose loyal support has helped pay their salaries.

ESPN talking heads and network TV analysts do not help. They often pose as social-justice warriors, but they are ill-equipped to offer sermons to fans on their ethical shortcomings that have nothing to do with football.

In truth, the NFL’s hard-core fan base is not composed of bicoastal hipsters. Rather, the league’s fan base is formed mostly by red-state Americans — and many of them are becoming increasingly turned off by the culture of professional football.

Professional athletes are frequently viewed as role models. Yet since 2000, more than 850 NFL players have been arrested, some of them convicted of heinous crimes and abuse against women.

The old idea of quiet sportsmanship — downplaying one’s own achievements while crediting the accomplishments of others — is being overshadowed by individual showboating.

Players are now bigger, faster, and harder-hitting than in the past. Research has revealed a possible epidemic of traumatic brain injuries and other crippling injuries among NFL players. Such harm threatens to reduce the pool of future NFL players.

There is a growing public perception that the NFL is less a reflection of the kind of athleticism seen in basketball or baseball, and more a reflection of the violence of Mixed Martial Arts — or of gladiators in the ancient Roman Colosseum.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who has received more than $212 million in compensation since 2006, has been a big moneymaker for the owners. Yet otherwise, he has been a public-relations disaster, largely because of his incompetent efforts to sound politically correct. Goodell often insists that trivial rules be observed to the letter. For instance, the league denied a request by Dallas Cowboys players to wear small decals honoring Dallas police officers killed in a 2016 shooting.

At other times, Goodell deliberately ignores widespread violations of important NFL regulations — like the requirement that all players show respect for the American flag by solemnly standing during the national anthem.

Ken Masugi, PhD, has been a speechwriter for two Cabinet members and for Clarence Thomas, when he was Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He is co-author, editor, or co-editor of seven books on American politics. He has taught at the U.S. Air Force Academy, where he was Olin Distinguished Visiting Professor; James Madison College of Michigan State University; the Ashbrook Center of Ashland University; and Princeton University. https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/04/puerto-rico-as-progressive-playground/

President Trump’s press conference in Puerto Rico made clear that whatever the island’s political designation may be, Puerto Ricans are Americans and he will act accordingly. The Commonwealth’s recovery—and not just from this hurricane—is part of the goal of making America great again. But the difficulties involved extend far beyond differences in political status or institutions. Clearly, Puerto Rico’s lack of a strong civic culture hinders reconstruction and the storm that caused this mess is of a kind much worse than hurricanes.

For the most part, the battered island has been portrayed in the media as utterly helpless, dependent on a trickle of U.S. aid and battling a hostile president, who because he tweeted that some Puerto Rican politicians “want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort” is now taken to mean that there is something inherently and irredeemably wrong about the Puerto Rican people. The slander is as unjust as it was predictable. But focus on that distraction will only hinder efforts to help solve Puerto Rico’s current and ongoing real problems.

The President’s bluntness about the absence of local civic associations and vigorous local government once again exposes a sad—if incomplete—truth about Puerto Rico. It is absolutely fair to say that it lacks the emphasis on individual freedom Tocqueville appreciated in Americans, as working to benefit neighbors and cooperate in local ventures for the common good. This culture of civic engagement spurred by confident and free citizens helps explain the Texas and Florida reactions to less severe, but still deadly and destructive, storms.

But even beyond the much-commented on financial and other acute crises that permeate the culture of civic friendship in Puerto Rico, there is still more under the surface that helps to explain the deep roots of the problems that will make Puerto Rican disaster recovery much more difficult than it otherwise might have been.

The Commonwealth labors under a severe debility—not merely a “culture of poverty” abetted by Spanish imperialism—but rather its subjugation to the cutting edge of Progressive theory and practice. Puerto Rico could have been a model for how freedom might be a blessing for nations that dared for a higher dignity than colony status. Instead, as Puerto Rico was liberated from Spain, American Progressives made it a model for government planning and dependence. If President Trump is serious about deconstructing the administrative state, then those same principles that apply to the United States proper should apply even more to Puerto Rico. All Americans deserve freedom.

As crucial as Franklin Roosevelt is for understanding the way the United States is governed today, it is even more the case that understanding Rexford Tugwell (1891-1979) is crucial for understanding Puerto Rico. Tugwell was FDR’s appointee from 1941-1946 as Puerto Rico’s Governor and New Deal Brain Truster. To encapsulate the economist Tugwell’s ambitions, it is revealing that novelist Philip K. Dick (of Blade Runner fame) made Tugwell his “hero” in an earlier novel, The Man in the High Castle, about the U.S. under Nazi and Japanese rule.

The non-fictional Tugwell, however, poured his ambitions into turning Puerto Rico into a laboratory for the New Deal. He gushed that the island “was a planning agency of the kind that I had said to myself I would someday try to see set up somewhere. This was my opportunity.” According to historian Michael Lapp, “it used to be said there that when one asked Puerto Ricans to describe the typical family on the island, they would answer: ‘the father, the mother, the children, the grandparents and the resident social scientist.’” Tugwell’s conceit was that social scientists would make Puerto Rico a “showcase for democracy” and a model for post-colonial development.

Tugwell enlisted the Popular Democratic Party (PDP) to establish a planning board that would issue top-down reforms of the government, the university, and the economy, including state-owned industries and infrastructure. His successor governors continued this Progressive experimentation. The current governor, a graduate of MIT, with a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the University of Michigan, is from the PDP.

The Civil Rights movement is dead. This noble effort to align the nation’s laws with the belief that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” was a time when brave black men and women, most of them Christians armed only with the power of faith and principle, endured violence and invective with dignity and grace. Now the Movement is nothing other than a wholly owned subsidiary of Progressivism Inc., a special interest outfit shilling for divisive identity politics that benefits only well-heeled black activists, professors, pundits, Congressmen, government workers, athletes, rap stars, and actors who all live with more privilege and wealth than most of America’s “privileged” whites.

The latest epitaph for the Movement is the spectacle of cheap moral preening by NFL players. Most of them multimillionaires, they have taken up the cause of the racist group Black Lives Matter, and now are disrespecting the flag by kneeling during the national anthem. BLM, of course, is predicated on a lie easily disproven that America’s police are targeting black males for extra-legal execution, and that persistent racism and “white privilege” are holding back millions of black people.

No matter that since 1968, police shootings of blacks have declined nearly 75%. That police are statistically more likely to shoot unarmed whites. That most of the quick-drawing police are blacks and Hispanics. Or that a black male is many times more likely to die at the hands of another black male: almost 8,000 black men died in 2016, 90% killed by other black men. For rich and privileged athletes and actors, honoring this blatant lie is a way to assert their racial solidarity with a demographic they have no intention of spending more than five minutes, if any, being around.

Meanwhile, black rates of intact marriages, homicide, unemployment, college attendance and graduation, drug use, and poverty continue to be terrible, despite trillions spent on Great Society programs, a Black Congressional Congress, and eight years of a black president who left office with all these indicators of black well-being worse than when he entered.

So what happened?

Short answer: the Sixties happened. Way back in 1993 Myron Magnet in The Dream and the Nightmare laid out the reasons, building on Patrick Moynihan’s prescient and reviled 1965 report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” As Magnet explains, the woes of the black underclass reflected the dysfunctional cultural effects afflicting the poor both white and black: these “Have-nots”

Lack the inner resources to seize the chance, and they pass on to their children a self-defeating set of values and attitudes, along with an impoverished intellectual and emotional development, that generally imprisons them in failure as well. Three, sometimes four generations have made the pathology that locks them in­­––school-leaving, nonwork, welfare dependency, crime, drug abuse and the like.

The live-in girlfriend of the Las Vegas shooter has landed in Los Angeles hours after the sheriff said that among the questions investigators are probing is “did this person get radicalized unbeknownst to us, and we want to identify that source.”

At an afternoon press conference, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Sheriff Joe Lombardo said of Stephen Paddock’s companion Marilou Danley, “Investigation with her is ongoing and we anticipate some information from her here shortly.”

He confirmed that she was in the Philippines. According to ABS-CBN News there, Danley flew from Manila to Hong Kong on Sept. 22, then returned to Manila on Sept. 25. There was no information on when, and from where, she had originally gone to Manila. Paddock reportedly wired $100,000 to an account in the Philippines last week.

“Currently, she is a person of interest,” Lombardo said. She was later met at the airport by FBI agents.

Lombardo said the department was making “progress” on a motive though he didn’t have any answers yet. “I anticipate a substantial amount of information to come in in the next 48 hours,” he said.

The sheriff said an internal investigation has been launched into the leaking of photos from Paddock’s hotel room, showing an arsenal of weapons, stacks of magazines and part of the shooter’s body, that were published in the Daily Mail.

Paddock fired at a “progressive, successive rate” for 9 minutes. The pattern of gunfire was wide, he said, striking some victims outside of the concert grounds.

The shooter had placed cameras outside and inside of the room; Lombardo said the FBI was evaluating all electronic equipment seized, but he was “not aware” of any transmission of video as Paddock conducted the mass shooting. One camera was on a hallway cart holding the dishes from room service that the gunman had earlier ordered.

The sheriff wouldn’t comment on a report that Paddock may have intended to target another, larger music festival, possibly renting several condo units overlooking the three-day Life is Beautiful pop-rap festival held Sept. 22-24.

ISIS persisted in its full-court press effort to claim responsibility for the attack, with its Amaq news agency, official Nashir channel and affiliated al-Batar Media Foundation all insisting Paddock acted on behalf of the terror group.

At a later news conference, Special Agent in Charge Jill Snider of ATF’s San Francisco Field Division said 47 firearms have been recovered from the hotel room and Paddock’s residences in Verdi and Mesquite, Nev.

“They were purchased in Nevada, Utah, California, and Texas. The gunman purchased rifles, shotguns and pistols. At this time, none of the guns recovered appear to be homemade. There were 12 bump fire stocks identified on the firearms in the hotel room,” she said. “…It is still being determined which firearms were used in the shooting. All of the firearms have been traced. We are still awaiting results from some of the firearms that were located at the Mesquite residence.”

The death toll was adjusted from 59 down to 58, not counting the shooter who died at his own hand. CONTINUE AT SITE

After seeing the latest football games, Americans should play Monday-morning quarterbacks and not stand on the sidelines while the players are kneeling. The players are making a sham of the National Anthem by insulting the flag, the nation, those serving, and those who have served, as well as the police, who run into a crisis instead of away from one.

A recent CBS poll reports that approximately 60% of Americans are against kneeling. In another poll, 34% said they are less likely to watch NFL games because of the Anthem protest. Ned Colletti, the former Dodgers general manager, in his recent book, The Big Chair, said it best. Although he was speaking of the troubled summer of 1968 and about baseball, the quote could easily be applied today while substituting football for baseball. He said, “Baseball remained my bed-rock, my refuge from the real-world realities that were all-too-uncomfortably closing in.”

American Thinker also asked those who have served how they felt about the players kneeling.

William was in the U.S. Navy and wants the athletes “to stand and place their right hand over their heart during the anthem, not raising their fist in the air. They act as overpaid and pampered prima donnas.”

Mike, who works for the VA, wants “everyone to watch this link. Few of the participating NFL players can articulate their grievances and willingly or unwittingly promulgate a false narrative about American societal injustices. This is residual from the Obama-Holder years. Incontestable. Incontrovertibly. Privileged athletes must find more constructive ways to express grievances without offending those who support them with dollars, especially those who served and families who paid the ultimate price.”

Val, a retired Air Force colonel, is against the player’s actions. “This is not the time to protest. It is a time to show respect for the nation. Generally, employers do not allow their employees to protest during working hours, and it should be the same in the NFL. Besides, it violates the NFL rules, and players should be fined for this.”

Val has a good point, considering that the NFL’s Game Operations Manual specifically states, “The National Anthem must be played prior to every NFL game, and all players must be on the sideline for the National Anthem. During the National Anthem, players on the field and bench area should stand at attention, face the flag, hold helmets in their left hand, and refrain from talking[.] … It should be pointed out to players and coaches that we continue to be judged by the public in this area of respect for the flag and our country.”

Michael, a Marine combat veteran who fought in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968, feels that the National Anthem “should not be used as a tool and the athletes should find another way. I want the athletes to understand that you signed for millions before you even played a single down of professional football. But someone who enlisted in the Army, as a combat-tested sergeant, will be paid $32,000 per year. You will drive a Ferrari on the streets of South Beach. They will ride in the back of a Blackhawk helicopter with ten other combat-loaded soldiers. You will sleep at the Ritz. They will dig a hole in the ground and try to sleep.”

It took 72 minutes for Las Vegas police to respond to the shooter. How can response time be cut?

Terrorists, whether domestic or foreign, organization-based or truly lone wolf and unconnected, all have important advantages favoring the success of their attacks: they can exploit the multiple vulnerabilities that exist in civil society (notwithstanding whether the terrorists operate in democratic or authoritarian states), and time is on their side.

Terrorists exploit shock and time.

There is not much that can be done to remove shock from the equation. A terrorist with a gun, a bomb, a knife or a truck can wreak a lot of havoc. Shock can paralyze potential victims and make it hard for law enforcement to go after the perpetrator.

In Israel, practically every adult has military training, and many Israelis are armed. While successful attacks have occurred (bombings, shootings, vehicle attacks, and knifings, to name some), the advantage Israel generally has is rapid reaction based on the simple fact that armed citizens know what to do when a terrorist attacks.

Most of the rest of the world is different. A police presence can help, but even then, in certain scenarios terrorists can be effective. Security guards can also help, but very often they are the first target of an intruder in a building or facility. In June 2009, a white supremacist 89-year-old James Wenneker von Brunn entered the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC with a rifle and killed Museum Special Police Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns. Other guards shot at von Brunn, who was wounded and apprehended.

A very important component in terrorist incidents is how long it takes for law enforcement to react and to neutralize the attacker. In Las Vegas from the time 911 was sounded to the SWAT team destroyed the hotel room door where the shooter was took 72 minutes. This gave the shooter ample time to use his ten guns, even reloading some of them while killing 59 people and wounding some 500 others.

Las Vegas has well-trained SWAT teams. Why then did it take 72 minutes?

The same question can be asked in countless other examples, whether the Bataclan night club in Paris, the 2002 Nord-ost siege in the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow, the Virginia Tech Massacre in 2007, the Washington Navy Yard attack in the NAVSEA building in September 2013, the 2015 San Bernardino shooting, or the Pulse Nightclub shooting in June, 2017.

In almost every case the problem amounted to a “time” problem.

The time problem consists of the following issues: (a) trying to locate a shooter and (b) attempting to reach the shooter and neutralize him (or her).