RUTHFULLY YOURS

On occasion even a mountebank like Beinert is right. What makes this so pithy is that it was published before Charlottesville…..rsk

“Antifa’s violent tactics have elicited substantial support from the mainstream left.”” Antifa’s perceived legitimacy is inversely correlated with the government’s. Which is why, in the Trump era, the movement is growing like never before. As the president derides and subverts liberal-democratic norms, progressives face a choice. They can recommit to the rules of fair play, and try to limit the president’s corrosive effect, though they will often fail. Or they can, in revulsion or fear or righteous rage, try to deny racists and Trump supporters their political rights. From Middlebury to Berkeley to Portland, the latter approach is on the rise, especially among young people.Revulsion, fear, and rage are understandable. But one thing is clear. The people preventing Republicans from safely assembling on the streets of Portland may consider themselves fierce opponents of the authoritarianism growing on the American right. In truth, however, they are its unlikeliest allies.”

Since 1907, Portland, Oregon, has hosted an annual Rose Festival. Since 2007, the festival had included a parade down 82nd Avenue. Since 2013, the Republican Party of Multnomah County, which includes Portland, had taken part. This April, all of that changed.

In the days leading up to the planned parade, a group called the Direct Action Alliance declared, “Fascists plan to march through the streets,” and warned, “Nazis will not march through Portland unopposed.” The alliance said it didn’t object to the Multnomah GOP itself, but to “fascists” who planned to infiltrate its ranks. Yet it also denounced marchers with “Trump flags” and “red maga hats” who could “normalize support for an orange man who bragged about sexually harassing women and who is waging a war of hate, racism and prejudice.” A second group, Oregon Students Empowered, created a Facebook page called “Shut down fascism! No nazis in Portland!”

Next, the parade’s organizers received an anonymous email warning that if “Trump supporters” and others who promote “hateful rhetoric” marched, “we will have two hundred or more people rush into the parade … and drag and push those people out.” When Portland police said they lacked the resources to provide adequate security, the organizers canceled the parade. It was a sign of things to come.

For progressives, Donald Trump is not just another Republican president. Seventy-six percent of Democrats, according to a Suffolk poll from last September, consider him a racist. Last March, according to a YouGov survey, 71 percent of Democrats agreed that his campaign contained “fascist undertones.” All of which raises a question that is likely to bedevil progressives for years to come: If you believe the president of the United States is leading a racist, fascist movement that threatens the rights, if not the lives, of vulnerable minorities, how far are you willing to go to stop it?

In Washington, D.C., the response to that question centers on how members of Congress can oppose Trump’s agenda, on how Democrats can retake the House of Representatives, and on how and when to push for impeachment. But in the country at large, some militant leftists are offering a very different answer. On Inauguration Day, a masked activist punched the white-supremacist leader Richard Spencer. In February, protesters violently disrupted UC Berkeley’s plans to host a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, a former Breitbart.com editor. In March, protesters pushed and shoved the controversial conservative political scientist Charles Murray when he spoke at Middlebury College, in Vermont.

As far-flung as these incidents were, they have something crucial in common. Like the organizations that opposed the Multnomah County Republican Party’s participation in the 82nd Avenue of Roses Parade, these activists appear to be linked to a movement called “antifa,” which is short for antifascist or Anti-Fascist Action. The movement’s secrecy makes definitively cataloging its activities difficult, but this much is certain: Antifa’s power is growing. And how the rest of the activist left responds will help define its moral character in the Trump age.

ntifa traces its roots to the 1920s and ’30s, when militant leftists battled fascists in the streets of Germany, Italy, and Spain. When fascism withered after World War II, antifa did too. But in the ’70s and ’80s, neo-Nazi skinheads began to infiltrate Britain’s punk scene. After the Berlin Wall fell, neo-Nazism also gained prominence in Germany. In response, a cadre of young leftists, including many anarchists and punk fans, revived the tradition of street-level antifascism.

Companies get in bed with politicians when it serves their interests and are quick to run away when it doesn’t. Thus nobody is obliged to interpret the flutter of CEOs away from President Trump’s advisory council since the Charlottesville riot as occasions of courage.

Still, these are some of America’s most delicate PR canaries, surrounded by risk-averse advisers. Mr. Trump’s administration is turning out not to be the administration they were hoping for, though probably the one they realistically expected.

Especially he has not made headway on corporate taxes—the issue that bought him whatever benefit of the doubt America’s CEO class was willing to give him.

Now a handful are fleeing his advisory council because he didn’t say the right words over Charlottesville, or didn’t say them quickly enough. This is big news because the media can’t get enough Trump. He insists on making himself the lightning rod. That’s one problem.

If the president or a scraggly someone close to him in the West Wing is soft on white supremacists because he thinks these groups are a vital bloc, this would be the miscalculation of the century. Their adherents couldn’t swing a race for dogcatcher. It is precisely the left’s fantasy of the right that these people constitute a useful electoral base.

None of the departing CEOs likely believe Mr. Trump is a white supremacist or Nazi sympathizer. They just see no upside to being associated with him. Two of those who quit, Merck’s Kenneth Frazier and Intel ’s Brian Krzanich, implicitly cited an unnamed individual’s failure to speak out forcefully enough against racism.

Kevin Plank of Under Armour perhaps indulged a greater honesty when he suggested his company belatedly remembered that it “engages in innovation and sports, not politics.”

There may be a temptation to liken these men to Google’s Sundar Pichai, who overnight acquired a reputation as a moral coward for firing a diversity-policy dissenter. Other CEOs, like Jeff Immelt of GE, found voices to express opposition to white racism without trying to turn themselves into symbols of anti-Trump resistance.

But Mr. Trump hardly helped with his response, a series of tweets about Merck’s high drug prices. Mr. Trump is the one party to these exchanges who doesn’t have three layers of advisers to help him discover his deepest thoughts. If he did, he might not be frittering away his presidency.

But let’s also notice how little this has to do with Charlottesville. Mr. Trump was essentially correct when he warned in his initial, widely panned comments, about danger from “many sides.” In one of those quirks of old-style magazine publishing, the Atlantic dropped a story, dated September, that went to press before Charlottesville and yet details the “The Rise of the Violent Left,” especially the Antifa movement that was in the middle of the Charlottesville brawl.

Mr. Trump, who perhaps actually paid attention to his Charlottesville briefing, may just have responded the way 99% of Americans would have to the full story. Or the way European publics in the 1920s and ’30s did when they saw Hitlerites and Stalinists battling in the streets and wanted nothing to do with either.

Happily, the social and political condition of America today is nothing like Germany circa 1930, even as both extreme right and extreme left peddle exactly the same delusive line that Trumpism is the force somehow carrying them to the centers of the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively. CONTINUE AT SITE

I am an apologist only for civil liberties and racial equality, not for a candidate against whom I voted.

The civil liberties of all Americans are at stake. I will not be silenced by false and unethical charges of racism from people who are deliberately distorting my views for partisan political purposes. I will respond and expose their bias, bigotry and mendacity, because the issues are too important to be left in the hands of partisan extremists.

In addition to falsely accusing their political enemies of criminal conduct, some extremists, who are determined to see Donald Trump indicted, have come up with a new weapon: accusing those who disagree with them of “racism.”

It began when I said in public what every experienced criminal lawyer was thinking in private:

“The second one [grand jury] is important because of where it is. It gives the prosecutor the power to indict in the District of Columbia, which is a district that is heavily Democratic, and would have a jury pool very unfavorable to Trump and the Trump administration. So it gives the prosecutor a tremendous tactical advantage… The District of Columbia is always solidly Democratic and has an ethnic and racial composition which may be very unfavorable to the Trump administration…”

I did not say that the residents of the District of Columbia would be consciously unfair to indicted Trump associates, or that Black juries are more biased than white jurors. I merely observed — as the Supreme Court, the NAACP, the ACLU and all experienced lawyers have noted — that life experiences matter in jury selection and deliberation. It matters whether a jury pool is largely comprised of Democrats or Republicans, Blacks or whites, poor or wealthy. If it didn’t matter, our legal system would not go to such lengths to assure diversity in jury pools. This is an uncontroversial observation, but nothing is uncontroversial in the divisive political climate in which we live today.

So people who know better have deliberately distorted my point in order to argue that what I observed was racist. It began with Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who dilutes the powerful term “racism” by tossing it around as promiscuously as rap singers toss around “motherf***er” Here is what she said:

“What he [Dershowitz] is saying is ‘all of those black people are there and they don’t like Trump and so he’s not going to get a fair trial and so they should take it out of that jurisdiction. It shouldn’t be there to begin with.’ I don’t like that, and I’m surprised that Alan Dershowitz is talking like that. We will not stand for it. We will push back against that because that is absolutely racist.”

American liberals never cease to amaze. As juvenile as their behavior can be, they now appear to have regressed to the infantile.

There is a booming business in (naturally) California that has taken anti-Trump hysteria to heights never seen. Indeed, Donald Trump has so incapacitated some people that only the “healing touch” of a good cuddle can help them deal with their angst.

Yeah, you read that right — “a good cuddle.” Now don’t get me wrong. Cuddling with a loved one can be comforting, emotionally satisfying, even arousing if you’re doing it right.

But how about with a total stranger? I guess as long as you both have had your life ruined by Trump’s election, a good cuddle will temporarily blot out your hysteria and give you peace.

Rolling Stone:

The reasons one seeks out a professional cuddling experience range from average adults seeking connection, those on the autistic spectrum, those healing from sexual trauma, adults dealing with sexual dysfunction or for older virgins to practice touch in a safe environment. The elephant in the room during some of these sessions, though, is the current state of the country’s affairs. Since November – and the election of Donald Trump – professional cuddling services have seen a spike in client interest.

“The holiday season was the first time that since Trump won the election that a lot of people were seeing their family,” says Adam Lippin, co-founder and CEO of Cuddlist, which provides training services to professional cuddlers and allows clients to search listings of “Cuddlists” nearby. “People with different political views were going to be in the same place with relatives. That was the first hit of people having to confront it in a significant way. We saw an uptick around that.”

But what makes the organized effort of being held, a service that comes with a cost (Cuddlist sessions go for $80 an hour), something that aids in relieving the fear and discomfort that has come with Trump’s presidency?

[…]

As executive orders, cabinet appointments, abuse of power, protests and other signs of political unrest sweep the nation, there’s a sense of unease brewing in many. They are turning to alternative forms of care to alleviate these fears.

Marcia Baczynski, co-founder of Cuddle Party, has seen her already established clientele base reacting to the election. Many of them, she says, feel triggered by Trump’s actions, history of sexual abuse allegations and manipulative behaviors.

“The work is actually political now,” Baczynski says. “It used to be the case that you talked about cuddle parties because these are important skills for life – everyone’s navigating boundaries. And now we need to have boundaries with our government. How the fuck do you do that? How do you conceptualize having a leader who is essentially an abusive asshole?”

A significant number of those seeking professional cuddling services have experienced abuse, and some see in Trump qualities that remind them of past trauma. Three days after the election, Anastasia Allington, a professional cuddler in Austin, Texas, had a session with a client who was bereft and frequently broke into tears. Another scheduled a cuddle session on Election Day in order to alleviate the anxiety he was already experiencing around the campaign. CONTINUE AT SITE

One of the negative features of our daily double/triple/quadruple media outrage cycle is that many people lose the context and history in which these events occur.

There was a lot of heavy breathing from the media this week after it was leaked that a grand jury had been impaneled by special counsel Robert Mueller — just one of many illegal hostile leaks that have emerged from inside the administration targeting President Trump.

The person tasked with investigating those leaks — until he was fired — was FBI Director James Comey.

But it bears reminding that the only reason why a special counsel was appointed was that Comey himself illegally leaked memos of his conversations with the president to the media for the purpose of having a special counsel appointed days after he was fired.

Don’t take my word for it. Here is Comey testifying on June 8 in response to questioning by Sen. Susan Collins that he leaked the memo of his conversations with the president specifically to provoke the appointment of a special counsel (beginning ~1:48):

Collins: Did you show copies of your memos to anyone outside of the Department of Justice?

Comey: Yes.

Collins: And to whom did you show copies?

Comey: The president tweeted on Friday after I got fired that I better hope there’s not tapes. I woke up in the middle of the night on Monday night because it didn’t dawn on me originally, that there might be corroboration for our conversation. There might be a tape. And my judgment was I needed to get that out into the public square. And so I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter. I didn’t do it myself for a variety of reasons but I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel. So I asked a close friend of mine to do it.

Collins: And was that Mr. [Benjamin] Wittes?

Comey: No. No.

Collins: Who was that?

Comey: A good friend of mine who’s a professor at Columbia law school.

Comey’s friend, Columbia law professor Daniel Richman, later admitted that he was the conduit for Comey’s leak.

Comey’s defenders claim that there was nothing improper or illegal because the memos were his private property and he was free to leak them. That explanation doesn’t quite fly. CONTINUE AT SITE

Every day it becomes clearer why former National Security Adviser Gen. Michael Flynn was unmasked and the early target of a series of illegal leaks targeting Team Trump. Flynn was an unabashed critic of President Barack Hussein Obama and someone who would take a bullet for Trump in any political battle. He had to be dispensed with and someone less loyal to Trump and more accommodating to the “resistance” put in his place.

That man was to be General H.R. McMaster, and the story of how he got to be President Trump’s National Security Adviser speaks volumes about his true loyalties. As journalist Caroline Glick notes in a recent article:

… there is the issue of how McMaster got there in the first place. Trump interviewed McMaster at Mara a Lago for a half an hour. He was under terrible pressure after firing Flynn to find someone.

And who recommended McMaster? You won’t believe this.

Senator John McCain. That’s right. The NSA got his job on the basis of a recommendation from the man who just saved Obamacare.

Obviously, at this point, Trump has nothing to lose by angering McCain. I mean what will he do? Vote for Obamacare?

President Trump has expressed his continued support for McMaster, even after a letter McMaster sent to Benghazi liar and serial unmake Susan Rice was revealed in which McMaster said he was perfectly fine with a person who should be a target of her very own special prosecutor retaining her security clearance. As Fox News Politics reported on August 5:

President Trump gave H.R. McMaster a vote of confidence after the national security adviser’s rivals seized on a letter McMaster sent to his Obama predecessor Susan Rice giving her continued access to classified information….

Trump issued a statement late Friday supporting McMaster.

“General McMaster and I are working very well together,” the statement read. “He is a good man and very pro-Israel. I am grateful for the work he continues to do serving our country.”

McMaster already had been in the spotlight for the series of firings he’s ordered on the National Security Council. Most recently, he ousted Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council who had been viewed as a Trump loyalist.

But Circa first reported Thursday that McMaster sent a letter giving Rice access to classified material, weeks after her alleged role was disclosed in ‘unmasking’ identities of Trump associates in intelligence reports.

McMaster may have served his country well while in uniform, but he is not serving his country well as National Security Adviser. McMaster insists the letter to Rice was a pro forma letter sent to every former national security adviser and every former president. But Susan Rice’s record is anything but pro forma and precedent can be broken, especially when the individual arguably should be in jail and not in public service.

Every board game has rules. Every card game has rules. Every athletic competition has rules. Every election has rules. Every society has rules. WHY?

Rules establish the object of the game and provide the organizing principle for fair play – rules establish what is and what is not acceptable conduct in the game. You have to take turns, you cannot look at someone else’s cards, you cannot challenge or dispute the referee, you cannot vote twice – and there are penalties for not following the rules in every game. If you don’t play by the rules in a game you either lose on points or are disqualified.

Let’s examine the sport of wrestling and begin with the overview of wrestling rules provided by West Virginia Wrestling: http://www.wvmat.com/overview.htm

The object of traditional wrestling is to pin your opponent on his back. When you pin your opponent, the match is over and you are the winner. If nobody gets pinned, the winner is the wrestler who has scored the most points during the match.

The rules of traditional wrestling identify holds that are acceptable and holds that are not acceptable during the match. “No holds barred” means there are absolutely no restrictions or limits on the holds used to pin your opponent.

Laws are the rules of society and like any game there are penalties for not following the rules – but what happens when the rules are abandoned and a no holds barred mentality dominates the game in politics?

President Donald Trump thought he entered a traditional match of presidential election politics when he descended the escalator at Trump Towers. Instead he found himself fighting in a professional no holds barred kayfabe wrestling match against the entire Washington establishment of swamp creatures colluding in a sinister effort to pin him down. The 2016 presidential campaign, election, and aftermath are a professional political wrestling match with the corrupt mainstream media hired as the kayfabe referee.

Kayfabe is professional wrestling’s suspension of disbelief that presents fake staged events as genuine competitions. In professional wrestling the referee’s on-stage kayfabe purpose is to convince the spectators they are watching a legitimate traditional match. In reality the referee and the wrestlers are participating in the staged spectacle of a scripted match with a pre-determined outcome. The referee and the wrestlers are actors who maintain kayfabe by playing their parts and never breaking character.

There are five ways to score points in a wrestling match and the swamp creatures have tried them all:

1) Takedown – (2 points) You score two points for taking your opponent down to the mat and controlling him/her.

Hillary attempted the takedown maneuver with her frontal attack on Donald Trump accusing him of being a misogynist. Amplifying her accusations with the infamous Billy Bush tape leaked intentionally just before the election, Hillary hoped to end the match by securing the women’s vote. Instead of pinning Donald Trump the tape ended the career of Billy Bush and exposed Hillary’s complicity in the real life misogyny, womanizing, and exploitation of women by her unfaithful husband Bill Clinton. No takedown.

2) Escape – (1 point) You score one point for getting away or getting to a neutral position when your opponent has you down on the mat.

Hillary tried the escape maneuver by accusing Donald Trump of being dangerously inexperienced. With the dexterity of a counter-puncher candidate Trump laughed in derision and asked the American public how the many years of “experience” of the career politicians in Washington had benefited anyone but the politicians themselves? Candidate Trump pointed out the unseemly corruption of the Clinton family – Hillary’s pay-for-play scheming while Secretary of State and the corrupt Clinton Foundation that only distributed a fraction of the monies they collected. Trump escaped.

3) Reversal – (2 points) You score two points when your opponent has you down on the mat and you come from underneath and gain control of your opponent.

Hillary thought she had Donald Trump on the mat when she romanticized the inclusiveness of Obama’s open border policies and support for illegal immigrants. She criticized Trump as a racist and an Islamophobe. Hillary campaigned around the country saying that real Americans needed to be with HER to be inclusive and accepting.

Donald Trump pointed out that open borders are designed to flood America with illegal immigrants who will vote illegally for their Democratic Party benefactors. He said the open border policy is a Trojan horse that will bring masses of immigrants from Islamic countries with cultural norms hostile to America and facilitate the social chaos necessary for the destruction of American democracy – the overarching goal of Hillary and her leftist Democratic Party. Candidate Donald Trump made a strong case for LEGAL immigration. After all, he married two legal immigrants. The distinction between illegal and legal immigration that Hillary tried to blur was clarified by candidate Trump and he accomplished a reversal.

“Clinton Fixer” James Comey was DOJ chief prosecutor in Marc Rich pardon case.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – As Special Counsel Robert Mueller convenes a grand jury to investigate the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign, it is important to recall that Mueller made the decision in 2005 to close a FBI grand jury investigation that was convened by the FBI in the 2001 investigation into former President Bill Clinton’s decision to pardon fugitive financier Marc Rich.

Also interesting is the role former FBI Director James Comey played in the decision to end the Marc Rich grand jury without a recommendation of prosecution.

From 1987 to 1993, Comey, working in the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, served as the DOJ prosecutor who oversawthe prosecution of Marc Rich, the billionaire oil trader convicted of tax fraud and trading with Iran during the embassy hostage crisis.

But in 2001, when Bill Clinton decided on his last day in office to pardon Marc Rich, Comey oversaw the criminal investigation, but decided there was no wrongdoing on Bill Clinton’s part, “despite public outcry over the evidence that Rich’s ex-wife had donated to Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign.”

That Mueller and Comey were both considered to be “Clinton Fixers” during the Marc Rich case bears merit given the case the grand jury was investigating, namely that there was clear suspicion Denise Rich, the ex-wife of Marc Rich, had bribed the Clintons to obtain the pardon.

The Marc Rich pardon scandal

In the aftermath of leaving the White House, Clinton’s reputation was not only racked by the sexual scandals, but in one of his parting acts, just hours before George W. Bush took the oath of office, Clinton on Jan. 20, 2001, gave a pardon to the swashbuckling oil trader and notorious tax evader Marc Rich.

Rich had fled to Switzerland to escape indictment in the United States for tax evasion and illegally trading with Iran while American embassy personnel were still being held hostage in Tehran, among other criminal charges.

The Marc Rich scandal involved Denise Joy Eisenberg, a songwriter for Aretha Franklin and Patti LaBelle, who Rich married in 1996 and divorced in 1998.

In 1998, Denise Rich helped bundle a $450,000 contribution to what was then known as the William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation to help fund the building of the Clinton presidential library.

According to the Washington Post, the contributions were made in three payments, from July 1998 to May 2000, at the urging of her friend Beth Dozoretz, then well known as a major Democratic Party fundraiser.

The Washington Post further reported that Denise Rich’s attorney, Carol Bruce, told a House Government Reform Committee that held a hearing on the Marc Rich pardon in February 2001 that her client gave an enormous sum of money” to the Clinton library fund, but the amount and timing of the gifts were not disclosed.

The principal function of a federal grand jury is to investigate a suspected crime with an eye toward returning an indictment — a formal accusation of felony misconduct. In the alternative, a grand jury may file a “no true bill,” a formal finding that the prosecutor failed to show probable cause that the subject of the investigation committed a crime.

Sometimes, however, to vote yea or nay on a proposed indictment is not the grand jury’s only option. In certain situations, federal law authorizes a grand jury to file a report detailing its findings, even if criminal charges are not forthcoming. One such situation involves investigations of public officials. Instead of returning an indictment, a grand jury may issue a report that recommends an official’s removal from office.

These columns have lamented the Justice Department’s assignment of a prosecutor to investigate the president without specifying a crime or the factual basis for a criminal investigation. We’ve also observed that no indictable crime is required to trigger impeachment proceedings. Neither, we now note, is a provable crime a prerequisite for the issuance of a grand-jury report.

Thus, the question arises: Is Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s impaneling of a new grand jury in Washington step one in the impeachment of President Donald Trump?

By statute (Section 3333 of Title 18, U.S. Code), a grand jury’s report may address (my italics):

noncriminal misconduct, malfeasance, or misfeasance in office involving organized criminal activity by an appointed public officer or employee as the basis for a recommendation of removal or disciplinary action.

While the statute literally applies only to an appointed public officer, there is little doubt that a court would permit the issuance of a grand-jury report regarding an elected public officer, too. After all, such a report’s recommendation of removal from office would not be binding — a president may be removed only by the Constitution’s impeachment process. And the report’s disclosure of any public officeholder’s conduct would be deemed in the public interest: There is some academic debate about whether a president may be indicted while in office, so the grand-jury report might stand as the only public accounting of an official’s alleged misconduct.

The U.S. Attorney’s Manual, which guides Justice Department procedures, elaborates that the statute’s phrase “‘organized criminal activity’ should be interpreted as being much broader than ‘organized crime.’” It includes “any criminal activity collectively undertaken.” That could mean any conspiracy or any fraudulent scheme involving two or more people.

Note, moreover, that the law does not say that the public official must personally be guilty of criminal activity. Remember, we’re talking here about a situation in which the grand jury has concluded there is not enough evidence to charge the public official with a crime. What the statute says is that, to trigger a report, there must be (a) criminal activity committed by some group of people, and (b) “noncriminal misconduct, malfeasance, or misfeasance” committed by the public official that somehow relates to the criminal activity.