RUTHFULLY YOURS

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) said she and other GOP senators are questioning why President Trump is spending so much time away from the White House.

Trump has spent more than half of his weekends at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, including hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. His son, Eric, defended the trips and 16 golf outings in 13 weeks of presidency as “a very effective tool” for the commander in chief: “If he can befriend people and find common respect, common ground and friendship – if you can have a good time together – then you are always going to see somebody in a very different light.” Membership dues at Mar-a-Lago have also doubled since Trump ascended to the Oval Office.

Judicial Watch, which tracked and slammed President Obama for $96 million in travel over eight years, said they would similarly scrutinize Trump’s travel, including the Mar-a-Lago trips that are estimated to run taxpayers about $1 million to $3 million each and could outpace costs of Obama’s total travel in one year. The Government Accountability Office told lawmakers last month that they would conduct a requested review of Trump’s travel costs, including examining whether adequate spaces exist at Mar-a-Lago to deal with classified information.

The GAO is also studying whether the Secret Service and Defense Department have mechanisms to rein in travel costs. CBS News reported last week that the Secret Service had spent $35,185 on golf cart rentals in Palm Beach before Easter weekend.

Trump, who was critical of Obama’s travel, hasn’t used the highly secure Maryland presidential retreat he dubbed “very rustic,” Camp David.

At a town hall in her home state Tuesday, Ernst was asked about the frequent Mar-a-Lago trips.

“I wish he would spend more time in Washington, D.C., as that’s what we have the White House for and we’d love to see more of those State Department visits in Washington, D.C., and I think it’s smart that he does business in Washington, D.C., so I’ve had those same concerns myself,” Ernst replied.

“I have not spoken to him about the Florida issue yet, but that is something that I think has been bothering not just me but some other members of our caucus,” the senator added. “So, I think that is going to be a topic of discussion that we have when we get back to Washington, D.C.”

Gerald McDermott is Anglican Chair of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School. He is the editor of The New Christian Zionism and author of Israel Matters.II

If there is agreement that a life is human, the individual’s right to choose is not final. The state has a responsibility to protect innocent life.
In other words, the decision in Roe v. Wade declares that the individual right to choose abortion is not absolute, but that there are times when the state can interfere in order to promote “its interest in the potentiality of human life.”

Imagine you are driving on a foggy night and you see a dark figure ahead. It could be a fallen branch. It might even be a little deer, or, God forbid, a little child. Do you keep on driving full speed and crash through it, or put on the brakes? If you think it might be a human person, either dead or alive, what should you do?

Most of us would say that even if we are uncertain, we should stop and check. We should give the benefit of the doubt to something that might be human, and, if it is, treat it with care.

I am sure that most everyone would stop and do everything he or she could to protect anything that might be human. But a recent article for Gatestone suggests that society has no obligation to interfere with a woman who chooses to get an abortion. The article concedes that question of when life begins is complex, and suggests that after the first trimester the question becomes more difficult. But it fails to distinguish between early and late abortions. The author criticizes “anti-abortion right-to-life advocates” who say that the state should sometimes step in:

“They do not want any woman to have the right to choose abortion for herself. They want to have the state choose for her — to deny her the right to choose between giving birth to an unwanted child and having an abortion.”

According to the article, the question comes down to who should make decisions about life and death — the pregnant woman or the “impersonal state.” Of course, conservatives agree that in most cases there should be individual freedom, particularly when it comes to very personal choices about pregnancy and children. But while conservatives differ on public policy for abortions in the first trimester and in cases of incest and rape (which according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute total less than one percent), they agree with some liberals that the state should protect life in the last trimester. Perhaps a majority of liberals, however, would say the state should never intervene on abortion, even when the baby is healthy and viable in the last trimester.

Liberals and conservatives generally agree that the state must intervene to protect innocent human life when it is threatened, and so should prosecute and punish murderers who take the lives of innocent children or adults. So, the individual’s right to choose to protect or end a life is not absolute. If there is agreement that a life is human, the individual’s right to choose is not final. The state has a responsibility to protect innocent life.

A certain hyperbole and obscuring of the full truth are seen as necessary to advance the kind of society that progressives want us to embrace.

Fred Reed, a talented commentator and former Marine who now lives in Mexico, recently posted a gutsy piece about all the achievements that white people should be proud of. Fred admits that whites, like other races, have committed their share of outrages; nonetheless, he also calls attention to their past and present attainments in the arts and sciences, and their respect for the ideal of freedom. Fred also predicts that if anyone comes up with a cure for cancer, this too will likely emanate from the mind of a white scientist or else from the talented descendant of someone who came here from the Far East.

Fred is clearly responding to the predominantly white Millennials who are protesting “white privilege” and screaming that “Black Lives Matter,” but presumably not white ones. If only “white college students” and the smug leftist media and professoriate who influence them could be reminded of what they owe to a predominantly white civilization, then perhaps they would take a more favorable view of their ancestors and kinsmen!

Fat chance of that happening, for more than one reason. One, the pitifully little concerning the Western past that has entered the consciousness of the average “white college student” is filtered through the multicultural left. It usually enters the student’s mind in this and no other way Fred’s corrections will not likely change the balance of power in our educational system or in our cultural industry. I recall that by the time I retired from teaching college after forty years, the only “cultural facts” that students entering a Western Civilization class could provide are that “Islam is a religion of peace” and “diversity is strength.” And perhaps it isn’t necessary for these products of our educational system to know more about the Western past to navigate through life. Their low opinion about their inherited civilization may actually bring academic and social benefit. It may be already part of a new shared culture. For most of our young, there may be little incentive to search beyond the clichés that Fred sets out to refute.

Two, and perhaps even more significantly, those whom Fred is trying to reach have no sense of belonging to a civilization that reaches back into the distant past. Their frame of reference is shaped by others who are living in a one-dimensional present. These young people, as far as I can tell, think that they know one thing for sure about the past: bad white dudes ran it. And we’re well rid of those times. Of course, those whose minds Fred hopes to change have no idea of their cultural debt to long dead males like Euclid, Dante, Bach, Newton, etc. But, even more relevant, they don’t see themselves as standing in any line of descent, culturally or physically, going back to the artistic, religious, and intellectual giants of the past. In fact, it’s doubtful that they even know much about their families, whatever their race, going back for more than one generation.

On Tuesday morning around 10:45AM, a Muslim named Kori Ali Muhammad walked through Fresno, California, shooting three men dead at random, including one in the parking lot of Catholic Charities. When he was arrested, he screamed “Allahu akbar.” According to the local ABC station, Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer “indicated it was ‘still too early’ to know if the shootings were an act of terrorism.”

Of course. And for those who refuse to acknowledge the nature or magnitude of the Islamic jihad against the West, it will always be too early, even if Kori Ali Muhammad presents Dyer with an ISIS membership card and a letter signed by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi commanding him to carry out this attack. In this case, the familiar dance of denial by non-Muslim authorities intent on absolving Islam of all responsibility for the crimes done in its name and in accord with its teachings is not the central lesson of the attack – that sad charade has played out all too often in the past, and will many more times in the future, and there is nothing new to say about it.

The key story in the murders committed by Kori Ali Muhammad is that they constitute a jihad attack carried out by an apparent member of the Nation of Islam, the racist black supremacist pseudo-Islamic group headed by Louis Farrakhan. According to the Los Angeles Times, “a Facebook profile page for a Kori Ali Muhammad from Fresno paid homage to black pride and black nationalism, with images of the red, green and black Pan-African flag and images of a raised fist. The page listed him as a ‘warrior’ for RBG Nation, referencing red, black and green.”

What’s more, “in recent days, he repeatedly posted images to his frenetic Facebook page with the hashtag #LETBLACKPEOPLEGO. He referenced ‘white devils’ and praised melanoma skin cancer. In a post Monday, he wrote in all caps: ‘MY KILL RATE INCREASES TREMENDOUSLY ON THE OTHER SIDE ASÈ ALLAH U AKBAR.’ Shortly before that, he posted: ‘BLACK WARRIORS MOUNT UP AND RIDE OUT *ASÈ* #LETBLACKPEOPLEGO.’” Ase, according to the Times, “is a term from the Yoruba people of Nigeria, referencing a concept that there is power in our spirituality, words and feelings.” Muhammad also referred to “white devils” and the Nation of Islam’s mythical evil figure who created white people, Mr. Yakub.

If Muhammad is indeed a member of the Nation of Islam, he demonstrates yet again how members of the Nation of Islam, even though orthodox Sunni and Shia Muslims consider the Nation a heretical sect, can identify with the global jihad, and place themselves in its service. The most notorious example of this is the Beltway Sniper, John Allen Muhammad, who along with his accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, murdered seventeen people in sniper attacks in the Washington, D.C. area in October 2002. Muhammad had joined the Nation of Islam in 1987; Malvo was discovered to have kept notebooks in which he drew portraits of Osama bin Laden and other jihadis and declared his determination to wage jihad himself.

This is welcome news…..and hard working union members should also challenge the unions’ use of dues to promote candidates…..rk

As its membership plummets, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is seeking to unionize home health-care workers, who have never previously organized and do not fit the traditional description of the public employees SEIU typically represents. The union is making its attempt in states across the country, but in Minnesota, where it has been rife with fraud, the personal-care attendants are pushing back, pursuing one of the largest union-decertification efforts in the history of the United States.

In 2013, Governor Mark Dayton (D.) signed a law declaring that home health-care providers — mostly women caring for disabled family members — are government employees, but only for purposes of collective bargaining. Shortly thereafter, the SEIU swooped in, pressuring workers to vote for unionization. Fewer than 6,000 ballots were cast, but because Minnesota law requires unions to receive majority support only from those who vote rather than from the entire bargaining unit, the 3,543 yes votes were enough to unionize all 27,000 personal-care attendants in the state.

To make matters worse, caretakers allege that SEIU did more than harass and “stalk” them — they say the union also forged signatures and denied anti-union voters ballots in the representation election.

Nonetheless, the resulting contract stipulated that 3 percent of the Medicaid funds that caregivers received in compensation for their work would be taken from them and handed over as union dues to the SEIU. But thanks to the Supreme Court decision in Harris v. Quinn (2014), unions representing home health workers can collect payment only from those who voluntarily opt in to the union and agree to have the dues deducted. But in Minnesota, the SEIU was caught deducting dues from caregivers who never gave them permission to do so.

Patricia Johansen, a personal-care attendant in Otter Tail County, Minn., told Matt Patterson of the Center for Worker Freedom that she never voted for the union or agreed to join and have dues deducted. In the fall of 2015, however, she noticed that the SEIU had been skimming dues from her Medicaid funds. When she complained, the SEIU said it had her signed dues-deduction authorization card on file.

Patricia, who is left-handed and “writes in an elegant and distinctive cursive” script, requested a copy — and received a form that had been filled out in her name in “crude, block letters” with a “clumsy” signature. Patricia had her dues refunded after notifying the union that she had been defrauded, but others have not been as lucky.

Now she and other personal-care attendants are collecting signatures to put the SEIU back on the ballot in hopes of decertifying this union that appears to have engaged in voter disenfranchisement, identity theft, and unlawful dues deduction, all in order to divert Medicaid funds to its own coffers.

In 2011, Dennis Kucinich was still a Democratic congressman from Ohio. But he was not walking in lockstep with President Obama — at least not on Libya. True to his anti-war leanings, Kucinich was a staunch opponent of Obama’s unauthorized war against the Qaddafi regime.

Kucinich’s very public efforts included trying to broker negotiations between the administration and the Qaddafi regime, to whom the White House was turning a deaf ear. It was in that context that he took a call in his Washington office from Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, the ruler’s son and confidant. Four years later, as he recalled in a recent opinion piece, Kucinich learned that the call had been recorded and leaked to the Washington Times.

The former lawmaker believes the monitoring of his communication and the subsequent leak are the work of American intelligence agents.

To be sure, it is not a solid case. Kucinich is now a commentator at Fox News, on whose website he explains his side of the story, and on whose programming ardently pro-Trump contributors are a staple — including contributors who have been sympathetic to the new president’s claim that he was monitored by his predecessor. The gist of Kucinich’s piece is to “vouch for the fact that extracurricular surveillance does occur.” The express point is to counter the ridicule heaped on Trump’s claim that he personally was wiretapped at Trump Tower.

As we’ve repeatedly noted (see, e.g., here, here, and here), there is no known support for Trump’s narrow claim (made in a series of March 4 tweets). Yet, there is now overwhelming evidence that the Obama administration monitored Trump associates and campaign and transition officials. There were, moreover, leaks of classified information to the media — particularly in the case of Trump’s original national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, whose telephone communications with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. were unlawfully disclosed to the Washington Post.

There is a question closely related to that of whether the Obama administration was guilty of a gross abuse of power — exploiting its foreign-intelligence-collection authority to keep tabs on its political opponents, thwarting and punishing their resistance. The question is: Did it start with Donald Trump?