RUTHFULLY YOURS

In a parade of horrors exposed by the Center for Medical Progress, one episode stands out. In the seventh video released by undercover journalists David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, former StemExpress technician Holly O’Donnell describes an experience at Planned Parenthood Mar Monte’s Alameda Clinic in San Jose, Calif.:

“I want you to see something kinda cool. This is kinda neat,” [says O’Donnell’s coworker]. So I’m over here, and . . . the moment I see it, I’m just flabbergasted. This is the most gestated fetus and the closest thing to a baby I’ve seen. And she is, like, “Okay, I want to show you something.” So she has one of her instruments, and she just taps the heart, and it starts beating. And I’m sitting here, and I’m looking at this fetus, and its heart is beating, and I don’t know what to think.

O’Donnell is then told to “harvest” the child’s brain: “[She] gave me the scissors and told me that I had to cut down the middle of the face.” O’Donnell did as asked.

It’s not often that someone confesses to murder on camera, but that is what O’Donnell did, assuming her account was accurate. The California Penal Code defines murder as the “unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought.” Not only did Planned Parenthood refuse to render care to a born-alive infant, as required by California law; it acted affirmatively to cause the child’s death.

Yet this revelation occasioned no interest. Major newspapers ignored it. Mainstream websites overlooked it. Nothing appeared on the nightly news. These were, apparently, not the crimes anyone was looking for.

Now, California attorney general Xavier Becerra has filed 15 felony charges against Daleiden and Merritt, the journalists who exposed the brutality and profiteering of Planned Parenthood and its affiliates, on the grounds that ostensibly business-related conversations among strangers held in restaurants and at conferences were in fact “confidential,” and so recording them without every participant’s consent violated California eavesdropping laws. You can read all about this news at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN.

Becerra, a Democrat, recently decamped from the U.S. House to replace Kamala Harris, now California’s junior senator, as state attorney general. (Last spring, Harris’s investigators raided Daleiden’s apartment, seizing a laptop and multiple hard drives.) Both have 100 percent legislative ratings from prominent pro-abortion groups. Both have received financial support from Planned Parenthood. At the time she ordered the raid, Harris was helping Planned Parenthood’s chief legal counsel draft legislation to restrict reporting on “health-care providers.”

There is much that ought to be said about California’s transparently partisan abuse of the state’s prosecutorial power. (In recent years, undercover videos have prompted California’s Justice Department to investigate claims of animal cruelty on chicken farms. This, as opposed to homicide at abortion clinics, is enough to prompt the curiosity of California’s law-enforcement officials.) There is much, too, that ought to be said about the hypocrisy of the media types who are suddenly silent about this unconcealed assault on reporters’ freedoms, after spending the days since Donald Trump’s election propounding the importance of a vigorous press. (“Like firefighters who run into a fire, journalists run toward a story,” MSNBC’s Katy Tur boasted last month.)

One hundred years ago, on April 6, 1917, the United States entered World War I. The ongoing conflict ended just 19 months later with an Allied victory.

The United States did not win the war alone, given the far earlier and greater sacrifices of Great Britain, France, Italy, and czarist Russia.

But America’s late arrival, with some 2 million doughboys who landed in France less than three years after the start of the war, saved the teetering Allied cause. By late 1917, Germany had knocked Russia out of the war and seemed likely to swarm the sole Western front and finish off the exhausted British and French armies.

On this centennial of America’s entry into the war, debate still rages over the cause and results of World War I in a way not true of the far more lethal World War II (an estimated 60 million dead) just two decades later.

Until World War II, the conflict was initially known as the Great War, on the naïve premise that the “war to end all wars” would never have to be repeated. But World War I did not solve problems as much as it led to even greater ones.

Unfortunately, World War I ended with an armistice — at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 — and not with an unconditional surrender of the defeated. Although Germany and Austria-Hungary clearly lost the war, their countries were not occupied and monitored, as would be true after World War II.

The 1919 Treaty of Versailles that was supposed to bring peace is often blamed for being too harsh on the losers. But it was more complicated than that. The settlement of Versailles combined the very worst of both worlds: blaming the defeated side, but without any means of ensuring that the humiliated losers would not rearm and try their luck again.

The victorious Allies soon hosted conferences outlawing deadly weapons, declaring war obsolete, and calling for collective security through the new League of Nations.

In response, the losing Germans often blamed back stabbers for their defeat and first interpreted such utopianism as Allied guilt — and later as weakness. Under Adolf Hitler, Germany rearmed and began absorbing neighboring borderlands eager to replay the verdict of World War I.

The United States was depressed that World War I seemed to have brought no lasting peace. It returned to its former isolationism during the depression years of the 1930s, disarmed, and was determined to never again become involved in Europe’s nihilistic wars.

Yet that very disengagement weakened the European democracies’ common front. Both European appeasement and American isolationism only encouraged the new Axis Powers to become even more determined to reverse the outcome of World War I.

World War I broke out in 1914 at an age when new offensive technology — machine guns, airplanes, poison gas, mass-produced artillery shrapnel shells, submarines — had vastly outpaced the arts of defense and medical care. It proved far easier to kill than to protect soldiers. And it was the first major war that was truly global, spreading beyond Europe to areas of the Middle East and Africa.

Mass deaths — especially during the great flu outbreak of 1918 — in the trenches from the Swiss border to the North Sea over four years of fighting nearly destroyed Europe. The war finished off the German, Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires.

In time, savage new ideologies — Fascism, Nazism, Communism — filled the void and promised to restore national pride and prosperity.

Forget all the pages of the Democratic Party platform. The only real Democratic platform left is the one sung by Groucho Marx in Horse Feathers. “Whatever it is, I’m against it.”

The elected Democrats still surviving amid the trendy restaurants of Adams Morgan and the boutiques of Dupont Circle are convinced that the voters elected them and that taxpayers are paying them to get nothing done.

Not one thing.

The ordinary leftist wearing a pink hat and clutching a Resistance sign either has no job or a government job. At the pinnacle of this pathetic movement sits the Democratic member of Congress making $174,000 a year, with Nancy Pelosi and Schumer taking home $193,000, and being paid to do nothing.

Around them circulate a vast network of staffers who are also being paid to do nothing constructive.

Taxpayers are on the hook for over $4 mil for the salaries of Senator Feinstein’s staffers. Schumer needed a $3.5 million staff even before he took power. Franken’s posturing requires a mere $2.8 million in staff salaries. It’s certainly a step up from 5 minutes with a comb on Saturday Night Live.

Alcee Hastings, threw a tantrum during the ObamaCare debate. “I don’t have to be nice to nobody,” he ranted. While Hastings was accusing Republicans of abusing poor people, the former impeached judge was carrying out his own charity work by paying his girlfriend $168,411 a year.

Taxpayers are spending a fortune to subsidize a corrupt bunch of clowns who spend all their time trying to bring down the government. The Democrats are not the opposition. Opposition parties oppose, but they also work for the common good. The Democrats only oppose for the sake of opposition. Their likeliest nominees burnish their presidential credentials by voting against everything.

The Democrats are not an opposition party, but an obstructionist party.

New presidents traditionally have a honeymoon period in which to assemble their administration and put forward an agenda. As David Horowitz has frequently pointed out, President Trump was denied any space in which to assemble an administration. Instead Democrats openly and covertly worked to prevent him from assembling an administration, let alone enacting an agenda.

The distinction is an important one.

“Deep-state holdovers embedded like barnacles in the federal bureaucracy are hell-bent on destroying President Trump.” So said Sean Hannity recently, and Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal took him to task for it. Stephens accused Hannity of right-wing paranoia. He quoted Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” and asked whether Hofstadter’s description applies to the right wing mindset of today:

“America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesman who are at the very centers of American power.”

By the time Hofstadter wrote these words, progressives had already gone a long way toward transforming the political system of the United States. As the Framers of the U.S. Constitution understood it, a primary purpose of government is to secure the property rights of individuals, which they believed are the foundation of all other rights. (Try to imagine freedom of the press without privately owned newspapers, or freedom of religion – in a country that is expelling religion from the public square – without privately owned church buildings on privately owned land.) This purpose manifested itself most broadly in the structure of the Constitution, which was intended to limit the power of democratic majorities, correctly regarded by the Framers as the greatest threat to private property and, thus, to individual liberty.

But in the early 20th century, the progressives set out to make America more democratic – through the 17th Amendment, for example, which substituted popular election of U.S. senators for their selection by the respective state legislatures. Their purpose in democratizing America was not to empower the people, but, rather, to “democratically” abolish the Constitutional barriers that had kept property rights secure for a century, thus freeing governments at all levels to intervene in the economic affairs of the nation, legislating wages, working conditions, hours of employment, and countless other matters.

Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute and the author of “Clinton Cash,” explained on Fox News Tuesday how a Russia connection to the Clinton campaign and Obama presidency is much bigger and more troubling than anything Democrats have accused Team Trump of.

During his appearance on “Fox & Friends,” Schweizer alleged that Clinton campaign chair John Podesta probably violated federal law when he failed to disclose his stock holdings in a Kremlin-funded company.

“In 2011, John Podesta joins the board of this very small energy company called Joule Energy based out of Massachusetts,” Schweizer said. “About two months after he joins the board, a Russian entity called Rusnano puts a billion rubles — which is about 35 million dollars — into John Podesta’s company. Now, what is Rusnano? Rusnano is not a private company, Steve. It is a fund directly funded by the Kremlin. In fact, the Russian science minister called Rusnano Putin’s child. So you have the Russian government investing in one of John Podesta’s businesses in 2011, while he is an advisor to Hillary Clinton at the State Department.”

“Does anyone in Trump’s circle rise to the level where there’s this kind of money involved?” asked host Steve Doocy.

Schweizer answered that he hadn’t seen anything like that yet. “Nobody that has an advisory role in the White House has had this money exchange. And certainly the money hasn’t exchanged as far as we know while they have been advising the president,” he said, pointing out that while he was an advisor in the Obama White House, Podesta owned stock shares with “Putin’s Child” and failed to disclose it.

“So then in 2013, he goes to the White House, to be a special counselor to Barack Obama, and that requires that you, you know, have financial disclosures every year,” he explained. “In his financial disclosure form in 2013, he not only fails to disclose these 75,000 shares of stock that he has in Joule Energy, which is funded in part by the Russian government. He also fails to disclose that he is on one of the three corporate boards that this entity has. It’s got this very complex ownership structure. He discloses he is on the company in Massachusetts, that is he on the board of a company in the Netherlands, but he fails to disclose that he is also on the executive board of the holding company. That’s a clear violation of the disclosure rules that I think needs to be looked at.”

He added, “What makes the Podesta case clear is there was a transfer of money and there was a transfer of a lot of money that stood to make John Podesta a lot of money. That is unique and that’s extremely troubling because at the time that transfer is taking place he is advising Hillary Clinton at the State Department. We know that from the Podesta emails that he is helping her make personnel decisions, speech decisions, policy decisions. He is meeting with her monthly. It’s a transfer of money from a foreign government, at the time that he is advising America’s chief diplomat, Hillary Clinton.”

Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) allegedly “caused a scene” at an Upper East Side Manhattan restaurant Sunday night when he bawled out a well-known and well-connected woman because she voted for President Trump. “She voted for Trump!” he reportedly bellowed.

According to witnesses, Schumer continued the harassment after the woman and her husband left the restaurant, following them outside and yelling more insults.

The senator was dining with friends at Sette Mezzo when he confronted Joseph A. Califano Jr. — the former U.S. secretary of health, education and welfare under President Jimmy Carter — and his wife, Hilary, who were trying to enjoy a quiet dinner.

Onlookers said Schumer was incensed that Hilary — the daughter of William S. Paley, the founder and chairman of CBS — had voted for Trump, even though her husband, Joseph, is a well-known Democrat.

One witness said of the restaurant rant, “They are a highly respected couple, and Schumer made a scene, yelling, ‘She voted for Trump!’ The Califanos left the restaurant, but Schumer followed them outside.” On the sidewalk, Schumer carried on with his fantastical filibuster: “ ‘How could you vote for Trump? He’s a liar!’ He kept repeating, ‘He’s a liar!’ ”

Hilary confirmed the confrontation, telling Page Six, “Sen. Schumer was really rude . . . He’s our senator, and I don’t really like him. Yes, I voted for Trump. Schumer joined us outside and he told me Trump was a liar. I should have told him that Hillary Clinton was a liar, but I was so surprised I didn’t say anything.”

This isn’t the first time Senator Schumer has gotten emotional about President Trump. After Trump announced his immigration order back in January, Schumer held a press conference at which he called the order “mean spirited” and shed copious tears.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lack-of-house-intelligence-1490742032

Devin Nunes is refusing Democratic calls to resign as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and rightly so. If Mr. Nunes is going to step down for speaking out of school to the White House about his probe, then ranking Democrat Adam Schiff should also resign for spreading innuendo without evidence across the airwaves.

Mr. Nunes blundered when he informed the White House about some information he received without first telling committee Democrats. The intelligence panel is one of the least partisan on Capitol Hill, and Mr. Nunes handed Democrats an opening to cast doubt on his fairness. He should protect his own credibility more than he protects the White House, which has nothing to worry about if President Trump’s claims about his lack of Russian ties are true.

But the main reason Democrats are mad at Mr. Nunes is because he’s raising an issue they’d rather avoid—to wit, that he’s seen documents showing that U.S. intelligence agencies may have “incidentally” collected information about people connected to Mr. Trump.

We know from leaks to the media that one of those people was former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who lost his job over the news. These columns have been asking since the Flynn news broke whether there was a proper FISA court order for this eavesdropping, or why if it was incidental was it spread widely enough to leak? Such information is supposed to be “minimized” and not widely shared so innocent Americans are protected if they happen to speak to a foreigner who is surveilled.

Mr. Trump was wrong to claim that Mr. Nunes has vindicated his famous tweet of three weeks ago that President Obama had wiretapped him in Trump Tower. Mr. Nunes has said he’s seen no evidence of that. But the issue of whether and why the Obama Administration was listening to Trump officials is important for the public to know. The U.S. government must have a very good reason for eavesdropping on political opponents, and civil libertarians would be shouting if Mr. Flynn were a Democrat.

Which brings us to Mr. Schiff, who while posing as a truth-teller is becoming more partisan by the hour. The California Democrat started out telling everyone that there is “circumstantial evidence of collusion” between Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia. He later escalated to claiming “there is more than circumstantial evidence now,” without providing any such evidence. If Mr. Schiff is so confident of the Russia-Trump connection, why not wait for the evidence to come out?

Meanwhile, Mr. Schiff evinces no interest in discussing, or even investigating, what happened to Mr. Flynn and why. Maybe he’s shouting so much about Mr. Nunes because he doesn’t want to know the answers to the questions the Republican is asking.