RUTHFULLY YOURS

About 100 headstones at a Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia have been knocked over, police said on Sunday, in the latest apparent vandalism incident at a Jewish burial ground in the United States.

A Mount Carmel Cemetery visitor called police on Sunday morning to say the gravestones of three of his relatives had been toppled, police said in a statement. Officers found about 100 others knocked down. The incident apparently took place after dark on Saturday, police said.

ABC television affiliate WPVI said the damage was widespread and footage showed rows of headstones knocked down.

We variously read that Trump should be impeached, removed, neutralized — or worse. But until he is, are his appointments, executive orders, and impending legislative agenda equally abhorrent?

General acclamation followed the Trump appointments of retired Generals H. R. McMaster as national-security adviser, James Mattis as defense secretary, and John Kelly to head Homeland Security. The brief celebration of Trump’s selections was almost as loud as the otherwise daily denunciations of Trump himself. Trump’s equally inspired decisions, such as the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court and Jeff Sessions as attorney general, presented the same ironies.

Most of these and other fine appointments came amid a near historic pushback against Trump, mostly over what he has said rather than what he’s done. But again, do the appointments create a dilemma for his existential critics who have gone beyond the traditional media audit of a public official and instead descended into calls for his removal — or worse? Indeed, removal chic is now widespread, as even conservatives ponder impeachment, invoking the 25th Amendment for mental unfitness, while the more radical (here and abroad and both Right and Left) either abstractly or concretely ponder a coup or some other road to his demise.

How do his opponents square such excellent appointments with Trump himself? Even bad people can occasionally do good?

Are his Cabinet secretaries patriotically (as I believe) serving their president, even if prepared at times to nudge him away from what they might feel are occasional unwise detours? Appointees of the caliber of a Mattis, McMaster, or Kelly do not go to work for any president with the likelihood of becoming undercover actors — undercutting his authority, or posing to the press that they are the moral superior to their boss, or leaking information to massage favorable accounts of their superior savvy or morality at the president’s expense. No, they serve the president because they want their country to prosper and think that it can if their commander in chief (whose agendas for the most part they share) is successful.

Or do critics argue that such fine men and women are “selling out” by putting careers before principled resistance to a president who will supposedly usher in unprecedented disasters? So far, even the most vehement Trump censors have not faulted these fine appointees for supposedly being soiled by association with Trump, whom they have otherwise accused, in varying degrees, of partaking of fascism, Stalinism, and Hitlerism.

Again, the point is, How do critics square the circle of damning Trump as singularly unfit while simultaneously praising his inspired appointees, who, if they were to adopt a similar mindset, would never set foot in a Trump White House? How does someone so unqualified still manage to listen to advice or follow his own instincts to appoint so many willing, gifted public servants — at a time, we are told, when nearly the entire diplomatic and security establishment in Washington refuses to work for such a reprobate?

The same disconnect holds true for Trump’s executive orders. Except for the rocky rollout of the temporary ban on immigration — since rectified and reformulated — his executive orders seem inspired and likely to restore the rule of law, curb endless and burdensome new regulations, address revolving-door ethics, enhance the economy, halt federal bloat, promote energy production, and create jobs. Without the Trump victory, the Paul Ryan agenda — radical tax reform and deregulation — that has been comatose for a decade would never have become viable. So, is the position of the conservative rejectionists something like the following: “I detest Trump because even his positive agendas are spoiled by his sponsorship?”

The liberal left has teamed up with extremist and violent Islamists in its next salvo against newly-inaugurated U.S. President Donald Trump.

The liberal left has teamed up with extremist and violent Islamists in its next salvo against newly-inaugurated U.S. President Donald Trump.

On March 8, International Women’s Day, a follow-up event to the January 21 Women’s March on Washington, will be staged.

One of the co-authors of the “militant” manifesto behind the nationwide event is convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Yousef Odeh.

Odeh was convicted in Israel in 1970 for being involved in two fatal bombings. Odeh spent 10 years in jail before she was released in a prisoner exchange in 1980.

She moved to the U.S. by omitting her terror conviction on her immigration papers and served as the associate director of the Arab American Action Network in Chicago and later as an ObamaCare navigator. In 2014, she was convicted in the U.S. for concealing her past and thus illegally obtaining U.S. citizenship.

After claiming she forgot about her conviction and imprisonment in Israel due to post traumatic stress disorder, she was awarded a new trial which is currently pending.

The women’s event manifesto, printed as an open letter in The Guardian, calls for “striking, marching, blocking roads, bridges, and squares, abstaining from domestic, care and sex work” and “boycotting” pro-Trump businesses.

All women are requested to wear red in solidarity for a day of “anti-capitalist feminism.”

Here’s the left’s next great idea for bringing down President Trump: another women’s march. Which means another public instance of Trump haters shouting slogans to one another and mistaking it for constructive politics. What progressives need to defeat Trump is outreach, but all they have is outrage.

On March 8, organizers seem to be aiming for a different vibe than the librarians-in-pussy-hats element that made the first women’s march after Trump’s inauguration so adorable.

Instead of milling around Washington, organizers have in mind a “general strike” called the Day without a Woman. In a manifesto published in The Guardian on Feb. 6, the brains behind the movement are calling for a “new wave of militant feminist struggle.” That’s right: militant, not peaceful.

The document was co-authored by, among others, Rasmea Yousef Odeh, a convicted terrorist.

Odeh, a Palestinian, was convicted in Israel in 1970 for her part in two terrorist bombings, one of which killed two students while they were shopping for groceries. She spent 10 years in prison for her crimes. She then managed to become a US citizen in 2004 by lying about her past (great detective work, INS: Next time, use Google) but was subsequently convicted, in 2014, of immigration fraud for the falsehoods.

However, she won the right to a new trial (set for this spring) by claiming she had been suffering from PTSD at the time she lied on her application. Oh, and in her time as a citizen, she worked for a while as an ObamaCare navigator. You can see why she’s a hero to the left.

Rasmea Yousef Odeh spent 10 years in prison for her part in two terrorist bombings AP

Another co-author, Angela Davis, is a Stalinist professor and longtime supporter of the Black Panthers. Davis is best known for being acquitted in a 1972 trial after three guns she bought were used in a courtroom shootout that resulted in the death of a judge. She celebrated by going to Cuba.

A third co-author, Tithi Bhattacharya, praised Maoism in an essay for the International Socialist Review, noting that Maoists are “on the terrorist list of the US State Department, Canada, and the European Union,” which she called an indication that “Maoists are back in the news and by all accounts they are fighting against all the right people.” You know you’re dealing with extremism when someone admits to hating Canada.

The International Women’s Strike is meant to be a grassroots affair, with womensmarch.com promising more information about how to participate in local protests across the US. Women around the country are being urged to walk off their jobs and join a demonstration near them.

Angela Davis Getty Images

According to The Guardian piece, women should spend their day “blocking roads, bridges, and squares, abstaining from domestic, care and sex work” and “boycotting” pro-Trump businesses. Also every woman is supposed to wear red in solidarity.

The establishment media has found a new heroine: Rumana Ahmed, a hijab-wearing Muslim woman who worked at the National Security Council during the Obama administration and for eight days into the Trump administration, at which point she quit.

Ahmed explained: “I had to leave because it was an insult walking into this country’s most historic building every day under an administration that is working against and vilifying everything I stand for as an American and as a Muslim.” That’s enough to send the media into self-righteous ululations of anti-Trump fury, but as always, there is more to this story than what the media is telling you, and a good deal about Rumana Ahmed that they would prefer you did not know.

In her piece in The Atlantic explaining why she left the Trump NSC (and it is important to note that she wasn’t fired by her supposedly “Islamophobic” new bosses; she quit), Ahmed sounds themes of post-9/11 Muslim victimhood that have become familiar tropes among Leftists: after recounting her idyllic life “living the American dream,” she says: “After 9/11, everything would change. On top of my shock, horror, and heartbreak, I had to deal with the fear some kids suddenly felt towards me. I was glared at, cursed at, and spat at in public and in school. People called me a ‘terrorist’ and told me, ‘go back to your country.’”

Not surprisingly, Ahmed made no mention of the fact that this Muslim victimhood narrative has been sullied, if not vitiated entirely, by the high number of “anti-Muslim hate crimes” that turn out to have been faked by Muslims. The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other Muslims have on many occasions not hesitated to stoop even to fabricating “hate crimes,” including attacks on mosques and even murders: a New Jersey Muslim was found guilty of murder that he tried to portray as an “Islamophobic” attack, and in 2014 in California, a Muslim was found guilty of killing his wife, after first blaming her murder on “Islamophobia.”

Ahmed blamed yet another murder on “Islamophobia”: “A harsher world began to reemerge in 2015,” she wrote in The Atlantic. “In February, three young American Muslim students were killed in their Chapel Hill home by an Islamophobe. Both the media and administration were slow to address the attack, as if the dead had to be vetted before they could be mourned. It was emotionally devastating.”

In reality, there is no evidence that the Chapel Hill murders were committed by an “Islamophobe.” U.S. Attorney Ripley Rand declared the day after the murders: “The events of yesterday are not part of a targeting campaign against Muslims in North Carolina.” Rand said that there was “no information this is part of an organized event against Muslims.” Nor has any emerged since then, although that fact has not stopped Islamic advocacy groups from routinely treating these murders as evidence of a wave of anti-Muslim hatred in the U.S. Ruhana Ahmed in The Atlantic abets this cynical and disingenuous agenda.

As the utterly pointless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drag on, going on 16 years after 9/11, the U.S. has finally moved to cut some of the bureaucratic red tape that’s prevented our troops from getting the job done for the past eight years:

Just a few months ago, Lt. Col. Browning’s phone conversation would have been impossible. Rather than request assistance directly, his call would have likely been routed through a joint command center much farther from the battle zone.
In the fight against ISIS in Mosul, the United States has adjusted its rules of engagement as American and other international troops are now closer to front-line fighting than before. During the push to take Mosul International Airport on Thursday, American and European advisers were embedded with forward Iraqi rapid response and special forces units.

Didn’t Obama say he ended the war in Iraq? Never mind:

Coalition officials say the changes are helping speed up Iraqi military gains, but they mark a steady escalation of U.S. involvement in Iraq that also reflects lingering shortcomings on the part of Iraq’s armed forces and growing political and military pressure to finish the Mosul operation quickly. This closer relationship is new.

In the lead-up to the operation to retake Mosul, U.S. forces steadily increased their footprint in Iraq, increasing the number of troops in the country and moving outposts closer to front-line fighting. But the number of U.S. forces on or near the front lines remained relatively small.

Under the December directive and an additional directive issued a few weeks ago, Browning said advisers like him embedded at the brigade level are now able to directly deliver support such as airstrikes and artillery fire to the units they’re partnered with. Previously, such support “would have gone through a whole bureaucracy and through Baghdad,” he said.

The spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition, Air Force Col. John Dorrian, confirmed to The Associated Press the rules of engagement in the fight against ISIS in Iraq were adjusted by the December directive, explaining that some coalition troops were given the “ability to call in airstrikes without going through a strike cell.”

Its about time. One of the reasons, historically, that American forces have been superior is that combat decisions were made on the ground, right down to the junior officer level; this was one of our strategic advantages over the Wehrmacht in World War II. But of course under the Democrats (and, to be fair, under Bush as well), American troops were hobbled so as not to give offense to our “coalition partners” and to mollify the excitable locals.

Now, please, let’s get on with it, finish ISIS, and get the troops home.

As you may have heard, or even watched (that’s ok, don’t be embarrassed, many people did) the bash President Donald J. Trump (R) specially wrapped into a self-love-fest known as the Academy Awards simpered for four hours Sunday night. Attired in outfits that cost more than a month’s salary for the average citizen — and that’s just the men — while surrounded and protected by guards (some even with guns) and other protective barriers, (sort of like uhm, walls) several of the presenters, the winners, and the host, Jimmy Kimmel, threw in digs at the president while proclaiming their own superiority and love. Yeah, that smugness will pack the 48% of the people who voted for Trump into the theaters.

Even an aging Warren Beatty, who did more than grab his you-know-what (I can’t really tell you as this is a blog suitable for family reading) in his prime, did manage to squeeze in a few cliches of love and peace and getting along with everyone which proved handy when he mistakenly announced the wrong winner of the best film at the finale. And so, quite suitably, the messy program ended as it began. And the lo-o-o-ng in-between wasn’t much better.
Of course the foreigners, (or should I say non-citizens?) got into the self-righteous act. Graciously nominated for best foreign language film, the nominees released a puffy, self-righteous statement two days before the big event, knocking the host country, the U.S., while

condemning “the climate of fanaticism and nationalism” in the U.S. and other countries.

They dedicated the Oscar, no matter which film wins, to those working toward unity.

They directors symbolically rejected the borders that define their category’s nominees, saying, “We believe there is no best country, best gender, best religion or best color. We want this award to stand as a symbol of the unity between nations and the freedom of the arts.”

The statement does not name President Trump but points in his direction, referring to an unhealthy climate stoked by parts of the population, “including leading politicians.” (snip)

On Friday, Farhadi joined with the other directors — Martin Zandvliet, Land of Mine (Denmark); Hannes Holm, A Man Called Ove (Sweden); Maren Ade, Toni Erdmann (Germany) and Marin Butler and Bentley Dean, Tanna (Australia) — to decry division and dedicate themselves to using the power of film to bring people together.

The statement opens with a condemnation of the political mood: “On behalf of all nominees, we would like to express our unanimous and emphatic disapproval of the climate of fanaticism and nationalism we see today in the U.S. and in so many other countries, in parts of the population and, most unfortunately of all, among leading politicians.”

The directors then spoke against division by gender, race, religion and other categories.

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump’s first budget will seek a sizable increase in military funding but won’t make changes to the largest future drivers of government spending: Social Security and Medicare.

Work to prepare the president’s first budget proposal, expected to be released in mid-March, ramped up last week following the Feb. 16 confirmation of Mick Mulvaney as director of the Office of Management and Budget.

The White House plans to send federal agencies their proposed budget allocations on Monday, a person familiar with the matter said. Mr. Trump will preview some of the budget priorities in his speech to Congress on Tuesday and release a budget outline in mid-March after gathering information from federal agencies.

The budget outline due next month will include only targets for discretionary spending programs and not any new proposals on taxes or mandatory spending programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid, said John Czwartacki, a White House budget office spokesman. The decision to defer the release of part of the budget blueprint is due in part to the delay in Mr. Mulvaney’s confirmation, he said, and those additional proposals will be included in Mr. Trump’s full budget submission later this year.

“It would be premature for us to comment or anyone to report on the specifics of this internal discussion before its publication,” said Mr. Czwartacki.

The president’s budget proposal marks the opening of the monthslong process to set funding levels for the following year. Spending bills originate with Congress and need 60 votes to clear procedural hurdles in the Senate.

In his address to Congress, Mr. Trump also is expected to emphasize two of his top legislative priorities: simplifying the tax code and dismantling the Affordable Care Act and replacing it with something else, White House officials said Sunday.

Speaking Sunday on Fox News, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the budget outline won’t include any changes to entitlement spending programs. “We are not touching those now. So don’t expect to see that as part of this budget,” he said.

Mr. Mnuchin, in an interview last week, said an increase in military spending “is an important priority, and I think it’s likely that you’ll see that reflected in the president’s budget.”

By pushing for more military funding and taking entitlement spending changes off the table, the Trump administration also would need to propose funding cuts for nondefense programs to avoid sending deficits much higher.

Mr. Trump, for example, is expected to seek cuts at the Environmental Protection Agency and in other areas of domestic spending.

Congressional Republicans have said they would look to Mr. Trump’s speech for hints about the first budget proposal his administration will send to Capitol Hill, expected in mid-March. CONTINUE AT SITE